Making a Drama out of a Crisis

Abstract

The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire Susan P Mattern Oxford University Press, 2013 HB, 368pp, £15.00, 978-0199605453 Although Galen of Pergamum (129–ca. 216) never left enough personal information to constitute a biography in the modern sense, he was a figure famous enough in his native city, with its Great Altar of Zeus (reconstructed in modern Berlin), as well as in the imperial capital Rome, for his passage to have been remarked on. While he may not have written much about himself he was a prolific author, with a corpus ‘making up one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives.’ So famous was he as a physician that he was associated in Arab legends with that other charismatic healer, Jesus of Nazareth. Susan Mattern has already written about the role of the physician in second-century Graeco-Roman society in Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. Her latest book examines the character of the man who was to be the last word in medicine for over a millennium. A rather mysterious, driven, arrogant, and vainglorious figure emerges. Galen himself suffered from a recurrent abdominal illness in his twenties and recovered from it completely aged 27, a cure he attributed to the intervention of the god Asclepius. …