ABSTRACT
Galen was his own worst enemy, and it is easy to list his many failings. Egotistic, verbose, dogmatic, unscrupulous in argument and pedantic in learning, he has been accused of holding back the development of medicine for centuries almost single-handedly. Indeed, the history of medicine is often written in terms of a decline from the great days of Classical Greece and early Alexandria until its final emancipation from Galen in the sixteenth century. Classicists have until recently shared this medical disdain. The prestigious Loeb series contained until 2011 but a single work of Galen, while the equivalent French Budé series had none at all until 2007. One can see through many of the strategies he uses to demolish his opponents and admire, without being convinced by, the artful rhetoric by which he accepts the plaudits of those who consider his successful cases miraculous, while at the same time playing down any suggestion of magic and quackery.
