Galen: A Thinking Doctor in Imperial Rome

This volume offers a comprehensive biography of the Roman physician Galen, and explores his activities and ideas as a doctor and intellectual, as well as his reception in later centuries.

Nutton's wide-ranging study surveys Galen's early life and medical education, as well as his later career in Rome and his role as court physician for over forty years. It examines Galen's philosophical approach to medicine and the body, his practices of prognosis and dissection, and his ideas about preventative medicine and drugs. A final chapter explores the continuing impact of Galen's work in the centuries after his death, from his pre-eminence in Islamic medicine to his resurgence in Western medicine in the Renaissance, and his continuing impact through to the nineteenth century even after the discoveries of Vesalius and Harvey.

Galen is the definitive biography this fascinating figure, written by the preeminent Galen scholar, and offers an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Galen and his work, and the history of medicine more broadly.

Vivian Nutton, FBA, is Professor emeritus of the History of Medicine at University College London, as well as Professor of the History of Medicine at the First Moscow State Medical University. He has published extensively on all aspects on medicine before the seventeenth century, and is the author of Ancient Medicine, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2012). He has edited and translated several treatises from the Galenic Corpus including On Prognosis (1979), On My Own Opinions (1999), and On Problematical Movements (2011). His edition and translation of selections from the neglected On the Voice is forthcoming in the journal Galenos. His recent studies of Renaissance Galenism include translations of Principles of Anatomy according to Galen by Johann Guinter and Andreas Vesalius (Routledge, 2017) and An Autobibliography by John Caius (Routledge, 2018). A general survey of European medicine from 1490 to 1628 is in progress.