ABSTRACT
Galen’s injunctions on the correct way to practise medicine are ubiquitous. They range in length from a few lines to whole books, and are directed to patients and doctors of greater maturity and experience as well as to those embarking on a medical career. Their message, that one should follow Galen’s advice and example as a Hippocratic physician, is constantly reinforced by instances of his successful intervention or of the failure of others. Time and again he emphasised that it was not enough simply to have read the right books and have gained a theoretical understanding of medicine: this must be supplemented by practical expertise, which reinforced, and was in turn reinforced by, philosophy. Indeed, his sympathies at times were far more with the approach of the Empiricists, with their store of practical information, than with those who put forward theories, however intellectually exciting, based on little or no acquaintance with the facts of medical life.1 Galen strove for a unified art of medicine, in which the effective treatment of the sick depended on a profound understanding of the body coupled with a broad acquaintance with all types of therapy. Although he acknowledged the existence of specialists, particularly in big cities like Rome and Ephesus, the practitioners for whom he wrote were of necessity generalists and were required to know how all the constituent parts of the medical art came together.2
