The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]
Author: | Language: English | ISBN: B00KTGJ3R6 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129-ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure. Like many Greek intellectuals living in the high Roman Empire, Galen was a prodigious polymath, writing on subjects as varied as ethics and eczema, grammar and gout. Indeed, he was (as he claimed) as highly regarded in his lifetime for his philosophical works as for his medical treatises. However, it is for medicine that he is most remembered today, and from the later Roman Empire through the Renaissance, medical education was based largely on his works. Even up to the 20th century, he remained the single most influential figure in Western medicine.
Yet he was a complicated individual, full of breathtaking arrogance, shameless self-promotion, and lacerating wit. He was fiercely competitive, once disemboweling a live monkey and challenging the physicians in attendance to correctly replace its organs. Relentless in his pursuit of anything that would cure the patient, he insisted on rigorous observation and, sometimes, daring experimentation. Even confronting one of history's most horrific events - a devastating outbreak of smallpox - he persevered, bearing patient witness to its predations, year after year.
The Prince of Medicine gives us Galen as he lived his life, in the city of Rome at its apex of power and decadence, among his friends, his rivals, and his patients. It offers a deeply human and long-overdue portrait of one of ancient history's most significant and engaging figures.
Direct download links available for The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 46 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Audible Studios
- Audible.com Release Date: June 6, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00KTGJ3R6
The reader will smile with satisfaction at the arsenal of information Susan Mattern brings to the life of Galen. Whether biographical, cultural, or professional, she animates a recognizable name and converts it into a reachable personality.
We see the physician Galen as a workaholic devoted to medicine. We see him as a committed scholar, frequent lecturer, and prolific author whose work, according to Mattern, accounts for "one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives." He is presented as the premier anatomist of his day (and many thousands of days to follow). And Mattern describes him as a showman reminiscent, perhaps, of some mix of Houdini and Jonathan Winters in his ability to improvise and dazzle in front of a fascinated audience watching him at work with his knife. Galen was remarkable in many other ways, including the fact that he did not accept fees but did make house calls. A physician to gladiators and to the household of Marcus Aurelius, he also ministered to the broad range of people in the street.
Galen's treatments of more than 1,800 years ago naturally puzzle today, such as directing patients to urinate on their own wounds, or using dove dung, snake flesh and other exotic substances. One wonders what specific link Galen perceived between the rub of a bug and the cure of a rash, but that was a brand of reasoning centuries down the road. Mattern says Galen's "most relevant contribution" is his "clinical practice" and that he "never lost sight of the idea that medicine is about treating patients."
This, then is a very good book. But it comes with a "tax" attached. At least 140 times, the author uses variants of the phrases "see below," "see before," or most annoying of all, "as I have mentioned.
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