ABSTRACT
Galen of Pergamum, the great physician of the Roman Empire, declared touch "to be the most accurate" of the senses, echoing Aristotle before him. Galen, indeed, has general physiological interests in touch and claims to be able to explicate all sense perception, as well as discussing these more practical diagnostic and prognostic points. Galen provides the most elaborate and developed discussion of haptic injury surviving from antiquity, as in so many other areas of medicine. All of the resources of Hellenistic anatomy, and of his own extensive practice of animal vivisection and dissection, are brought to bear on the topic, in a systematic and integrated way. The many developments in learned Greek medical discourse over the Hellenistic period are both manifest and hard to trace with precision, since almost all the actual texts have been lost. Touch emerges from all of these discussions as something quite encompassing, certainly more than the perception of pressure, however complexly construed.
