102 SCIENCE IN GRECO-ROMAN ANTIOUITY 



necessary to go from Rome to Alexandria to learn 

 anatomy from a human skeleton. After having 

 studied at Smyrna, Corinth and Alexandria, Galen, at 

 the age of 28, settled at Pergamum as physician to the 

 athletes. After some years he decided to try his 

 fortune in Rome, in which city he soon gained great 

 renown. When attacked by his colleagues he defended 

 himself by publishing some pamphlets of which the 

 tone and matter is often coarse. When he was about 

 to be presented to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he 

 abruptly quitted Rome, fearing that a plague, which 

 had just broken out in the East, would spread 

 there. He returned after a short time, and displayed 

 great activity for another thirty years. His physio- 

 logical conceptions are based on the humoral theory of 

 Hippocrates, an author with whom he was very 

 familiar and whom he followed intelligently ; his doc- 

 trine of the vital forces placed by Nature in the body 

 to control it, had a great influence in later times. In 

 therapeutics, Galen recommends cures of fresh air and 

 of milk, also medicines of doubtful composition. 

 Amongst these, he highly commends theriac, an 

 antidote against poison, specially prepared for the 

 emperor, which was composed of 70 ingredients, includ- 

 ing the bodies of boiled vipers. With all this, however, 

 he recognized the importance of anatomy, and in 

 default of human bodies the dissection of which was 

 forbidden, he operated on animals, more especially 

 monkeys. 1 After him, medical literature produced 

 nothing but compilations of which the most celebrated 

 is, justly, that of Oribasius, the physician of Julian 

 the Apostate. 



Among the natural sciences, botany continued to 



benefit from the progress made by medicine. 



Dioscorides of Cilicia in the first century compiled a 



catalogue of useful plants (to the number of 600), 



1 15 Heiberg, Naturwiss., p. 94. 



