160 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



ranking above all others figuring in the early history of medicine 

 except Hippocrates. 



Galen was a Greek, born at Pergamos in the year 131 of our era. 

 Ancient annalists take note of the fact that Pergamos was the seat 

 of the most celebrated of- temples to ^Esculapius; therefore of good 

 augury as the birthplace of predestined physicians. Nico, the 

 father of Galen, was skilled in philosophy, geometry, and astronomy, 

 and was an architect; also evidently interested in plant life from 

 the philosophic point of view, for the son reports it that Nico, 

 as if doubting about the transmutability of one species into another, 

 made some experiments with grain sowing, the result being the 

 removal of all doubt concerning the changeability of certain grains 

 into chess, or darnel. 



The career of the son seems to indicate that the architect Nico 

 was a man of wealth ; for the child received most careful education 

 under the best masters at Pergamos. At the age of seventeen 

 years, having chosen the profession of medicine, he was sent upon 

 his travels, and continued them until the age of twenty-eight. He 

 spent several years in ^Egypt, with headquarters at Alexandria, 

 passing thence into Bithynia, Palestine, Thrace, Macedonia, Italy, 

 and the islands of Crete, Cyprus, and Lemnos, these all noted in 

 that early time for the wealth of drugs, and the good quality 

 of them, that were imported from them into all the cities of the 

 then known world. The high distinction to which he afterwards 

 attained attests the improvement made of those rare opportunities 

 that wealth had afforded him. One object of these prolonged 

 journeyings had been that of profiting intellectually by converse 

 with learned men, and the most noted physicians of every land. 

 He was reputed also to have mastered all the dialects of Greek, as 

 well as the Latin, Persian, and Ethiopian tongues. Also every- 

 where he sought the most perfect knowledge of every plant any- 

 where in use remedially. It was not enough that a given remedy 

 might be purchased from any druggist. The physician ought to 

 know all about the plant, even as living and in its native soil, and 

 thus become qualified to distinguish pharmacologically between 

 the false and the genuine, and to detect adulterants. 



Galen's years of travel were concluded by a considerable sojourn 

 in ^gypt, at Alexandria, then the world's greatest center of art 

 and erudition; and thence he returned to his native Pergamos, 

 where for some years the surgical and medical care of the gladiators 

 was committed to him. In the year 164, when he was about 

 thirty-three years of age, a revolutionary disturbance in his native 



