ABSTRACT
Galen of Pergamum is a pivotal figure in the history of Western medicine. Just as the creation of the Hippocratic Corpus in the early Hellenistic period gave a new shape to Greek medicine by establishing a bloc of material against which others could react, favourably or unfavourably, so, 400 years later, Galen by his own example and his writings imposed upon later learned physicians an idea of what medicine was (and, equally important, what it was not) that lasted for more than a millennium. As we saw in the previous chapter, many of his views were not unique to him, but the forceful way in which he developed them and decried others, his frequent claims for the superiority of this or that technique or intellectual methodology, and the sheer power and prolixity of his writings impressed a Galenic stamp on subsequent medicine in Byzantium, the Middle East and the mediaeval West. 1
