Wild as it may seem, this pathological theory of the Methodists contained an element of truth; in various guises it has cropped up once and again at different epochs of medical history; even to-day there are pathologists who tend to describe certain classes of disease in terms of vaso-constriction and vaso-dilatation. The vice of the Methodist teaching was that it looked on a disease too much as something fixed and finite, an independent _entity_, to be considered entirely apart from its particular setting. The Methodists illustrate for us the tyranny of _names_. In its defects as in its virtues this school has analogues at the present day; we are all acquainted with the medical man to whom a name (such, let us say, as "tuberculosis," "gout," or "intestinal auto-intoxication") stands for an entity, one and indivisible, to be treated by a definite and unvarying formula. To such an individual the old German saying "_Jedermann hat am Ende ein Bischen Tuberkulose_" is simply--incomprehensible. [Sidenote: Galen.] All the medical schools which I have mentioned were still holding their ground in the 2nd century A.D., with more or less popular acceptance, when the great Galen made his entry into the world of Graeco-Roman medicine. [Sidenote: His Nature and Nurture.] Claudius Galenus was born at Pergamos in Asia Minor in the year A.D. His father was one Nicon, a well-to-do architect of that city. "I had the great good fortune," says Galen,[1] "to have as a father a highly amiable, just, good, and benevolent man. My mother, on the other hand, possessed a very bad temper; she used sometimes to bite her serving-maids, and she was perpetually shouting at my father and quarrelling with him--worse than Xanthippe with Socrates. When, therefore, I compared the excellence of my father's disposition with the disgraceful passions of my mother, I resolved to embrace and love the former qualities, and to avoid and hate the latter." Nicon called his son [Greek: Galênos], which means _quiet, peaceable_, and although the physician eventually turned out to be a man of elevated character, it is possible that his somewhat excessive leaning towards controversy (exemplified in the following pages) may have resulted from the fact that he was never quite able to throw off the worst side of the maternal inheritance. His father, a man well schooled in mathematics and philosophy, saw to it that his son should not lack a liberal education. Pergamos itself was an ancient centre of civilisation, containing, among other culture-institutions, a library only second in importance to that of Alexandria itself; it also contained an Asclepieum.