Galen

GALEN

Galen (130 - 200 AD) was a passionate vivisector and the first physician on record to demonstrate the danger of animal experimentation for medical science. His vivisection of animals did not merely fail to teach him anything about the human body, but became the source of grievous mistakes that were to wreak havoc on mankind for 15 centuries. All his valid knowledge came from his clinical experience - how to set broken bones, for instance, and the therapeutic value of certain herbs.

Galen was thirty years old when he came to Rome from his native Pergamon in Greece, where he had already gained a reputation as the doctor to the gladiators, and in the next thirty years he was to become the the personal physician to 5 Emperors.

He was also a prolific writer on the medical art, and his monotheistic ideals, his belief in one supreme being, led the Catholic Church later on to decree his scientific doctrine as the only "correct" one. For various centuries, whoever dared raise doubts about a Galenic teaching was made to recant on the rack of the Holy Inquisition. As a consequence, humanity had to suffer for 15 centuries from many fatal mistakes.

In 192, a fire destroyed most of Galen's personal library, which included 400 of his medical treatises. Had the fire destroyed them all we would have to believe meekly the traditional teachings that describe Galen as the greatest medical man of antiquity. But the fire spared 98 of his medical works; and from them it emerges that all his valid medical knowledge came from his clinical experiences, from his contact with patients - like his belief that the mind influences organic reactions; whereas all his major errors derived from his sectioning of animals. He had a vast knowledge of herbs, like all Greek doctors, who had imported this knowledge from Asia.

In the course of time, the humane and hygienic precepts of Hippocrates were scorned. Plinius tells us that up to the First Empire the Romans had been a healthy people, thanks to the prevalent hygiene and sanitary services, exemplified by the aquaducts and the public thermae. But by and by, the reasonable Hippocratic precepts, such as intake of a frugal, simple diet, and rigorous cleanliness, which could be had for nothing, lost their fascination as a new breed of medical men discovered there was more money in preaching the importance of amulets, magic and astrology.

Not only in the Orient and ancient Egypt, but also in the Roman Empire, surgery had been highly developed. Operations performed in antiquity included tonsilectomies, removal of cataracts and goiters, trepanation of the cranium, the excision of tumors, the removal of kidney and gall stones, even plastic surgery. Celsus, the antivivisectionist Roman best qualified for the title of original scientist, and a follower of the Hippocratic school, had described many of these operations in a First Century manual on surgery. But in the following centuries the gradual abandonment of Hippocratic hygiene, not yet known as asepsis, started increasing the danger of surgical operations to such an extent that little by little they were reduced to a minimum.

In the Middle Ages they were confined mostly to amputations, which were performed only in extreme cases, owing to the almost inevitable danger of infection and the difficulty of checking hemorrhages. The technique of the Greeks to ligature the vessels had gone the way of all surgical science, and the stumps were cauterized with red-hot irons or boiling oil.

Many of Galen's teachings were disastrous for mankind - such as his belief that pus was beneficial to healing, or that fruit is harmful. Galen had noticed that dogs and cats shunned fruits, and it was to be medieval man's misfortune that Galen's father, who never touched fruit, lived to an advanced age, so Galen saw in this a confirmation that the avoidance of fruit insures old age.

These and other Galenic mis-teachings made themselves tragically felt throughout the Middle Ages. The teachers of anatomy had no other texts than Galen's: woman has two wombs, one for the male children, the other for the females; urine is secreted directly from the vena cava. The blood passes from the right ventrical to the left ventrical through invisible pores. Galen had acquired all these and many other wrong notions either through his experiments on live animals, or in spite of them.

And his many vivisections had failed to reveal to Galen that the blood circulates, although he investigated the problem. In fact he is credited with the discovery that the veins do not contain air, as his contemporaries believed, but blood.

The abandonment of hygiene as an old-fashioned, pagan superstition was welcomed by the Church, owing to her horror of sex and nudity, and was fostered by her with dire consequences for mankind. Not only were the classic Greek and Roman images and statues of nudes destroyed, clad or painted over in most of Europe, but the public thermae that had done so much to keep the ancient Greek and Roman people healthy, were closed down. Body washing and even just looking at one's own nudity were considered evidence of sinfulness and depravity, and the few people who were sometimes ordered by their physician to take a bath were lowered into the tub fully clothed. To this day, for the rare baths in some Italian parochial boarding schools, a chaste bathing suit must be worn in the tub, and mirrors are absent.

All the medical historians (Sigerist, Dubos, Inglis) concur that the disappearance of the great medieval epidemics, including the bubonic plague which wiped out nearly half of Europe, was not due to the introduction of any specific therapy, but to the introduction of hygiene, of the sewer system and clean water in the cities, and that the startling improvements these institutions brought, raising life expectancy dramatically, started half a century before large-scale vaccination was adopted. Oddly enough, it did not seem to occur to any of those historians that what they defined as the "mysterious" insurgence of those epidemics, was not mysterious at all but the inevitable consequence of Church-supported Galenism, i.e. the abandonment of Hippocratic hygiene. The disastrous plagues of the Middle Ages were the legitimate offspring of the sad, long-lasting union between the sexuophobia of the Church and the extrapolation to man of observations made on animals, which, for instance, don't need washing with lots of soap and hot water after bringing forth, because the antiseptic effect of their own saliva is sufficient to prevent puerperal fever. Today, pestilences keep turning up wherever populations are crowded and cleanliness is absent. In unhygienic southern Italy, puerperal fever causes as many deaths as a century ago.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, who considered it normal to blind the rebels, impale the enemy soldiers and put to the sword the vanquished populations, had forbidden under pain of death, the section of human cadavers - but not of living animals; and later on the Church retained that attitude. This explains why in the Western world the medical men who were trying, like today's vivisectors, "to discover the secrets of human life" by cutting up living animals, moved backwards instead of forward, forgetting Hippocrates' teachings and getting morassed deeper and deeper in a Galenism seasoned with astrology, magic and religion. And then, as now, the majority went along, unthinkingly.