CLAUDIUS GALENUS, commonly called Galen, or, as mediæval writers named him, Gallien, was a very celebrated physician and philosopher, who was born at Pergamos in Asia, A.D. 131, under Hadrian. His father, Nicon, was an architect and geometrician, a highly cultivated and estimable man. His mother was a passionate scold, who led her husband a worse life than Xantippe led Socrates. Nicon spared no pains to give his son an education which should fit him to be a philosopher, and in his fifteenth year he was a pupil of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean philosophies. In his seventeenth year his father, in consequence of a dream, changed his intentions concerning his son’s profession, and determined that he should study medicine. His first tutors were Æschrion, Satyrus, and Stratonicus. He studied the doctrines of all the sects of medicine in the school of Alexandria, and travelled in Egypt, Greece, Asia, and Italy. He devoted himself to none of the schools of medicine whose doctrines he had studied, but struck out a path for himself. On his return to Pergamos, he was selected to take charge of the wounded gladiators, a position which afforded him opportunities for studying surgical operations. He filled this post with great reputation and success. When he was thirty-four years old he went to Rome for the first time, remaining there four years, and acquiring a great reputation for his knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and medicine. He was connected with many persons of great influence, and his popularity at last became so great that it excited the ill-will of his professional brethren, especially as by his lecturing, writing, and disputing, his name was constantly before them. So great was the ill-feeling they bore towards him that he was afraid of being poisoned. He was called the “wonder speaker” and the “wonder worker.” “The greatest savant of all the ancient physicians,” says Sprengel, “was Galen. He strove to introduce into medicine a severe dogmatism, and to give it a scientific appearance, borrowed almost entirely from the Peripatetic school. The enormous number of his works, the systematic order which distinguishes them, and the elegance of their style, won over, as by an irresistible charm, the indolent physicians who succeeded him, so that during many ages his system was considered as immovable.”[496]