THE GRECO-ROMAN PERIOD 101 



philosophy. The spirit or pneuma (jtvevjua), which is 

 innate in every man, regulates health and disease. 

 Archigenes of Syria, about the year ioo a.d., some- 

 what modified this theory. His writings are lost, 

 but we can reconstruct them partly by the quotations 

 of Galen and partly by a compilation of Aretaeus 

 of Cappadocia, who borrowed from Archigenes the 

 best part of its contents. It contains faithful and 

 penetrating observations of nature, and a remarkable 

 description of elephantiasis, a disease which was still 

 unknown in the West. In therapeutics, Archigenes 

 favoured regimen ; he studied the effects of wine and 

 mineral waters, and recommended cold water baths 

 and sun baths. 



Apart from some minor works of Rufus of Ephesus, 

 none of the medical literature of the first century a.d. 

 is extant. This lack is due to Claudius Galen, who 

 played the same part in Greek medicine as Ptolemy in 

 astronomy, that is, in his works, he absorbed and 

 rendered useless those of his predecessors. 1 He was 

 born at Pergamum in 129 and died at Rome in 200 

 A.D., received a careful and extensive education, and 

 in the midst of a busy life, found time to write more 

 than 150 medical works, of which about 60 are 

 extant. This enormous production inevitably contains 

 repetitions and superficial pages, and it is stamped 

 with childish vanity, but it possesses none the less 

 real merit, independently of the part it has played 

 in the history of medicine. Galen indeed was not a 

 mere compiler and arm-chair philosopher ; he was a 

 practitioner and knew how to carry out successful 

 researches ; he raised the level of medicine at an 

 epoch when the schools in repute proclaimed, in the 

 name of empiricism, the futility of theoretical pre- 

 paratory studies for this science, and when it was 



1 For the life and writings of Galen, see Croiset, Histoire 

 de la litterature grecque, V, p. 715, Fontemoing, Paris, 1899. 



