How Did Galen Contribute To Medicine

Galen is termed one of the greatest physicians of ancient Rome. He was born in the year 129 AD (died 216 AD) in the city of Asia Minor (today, Turkey). Galen was from a very well off family. Galen’s pursuit of medicine was perhaps innate but there was a pivotal moment when he was a teenager that maybe contributed to shaping how his future would turn out and the emphasis on what his journey in life would be. His father had a dream about Galen and it was about him pursuing medicine. His father told him about this dream and when Galen was old enough, he went after the vision his father had of him. Without this dream, who knows where we would be without the contributing factors to medicine from Galen’s studies, experiments and research.

One of the most influential ways that Galen contributed to medicine is through his study of anatomy. It is noted that Galen was obsessed about how the body worked and how it functioned. When Galen returned back to his hometown after practicing medicine away, he was made the chief physician to the gladiators. By tending to them when they suffered many incredible injuries to their bodies, he was able to then start to see how the body worked and how it healed. Perhaps this was the evolutionary moment of what lead him to be so interested in anatomy. He conducted many procedures on animals, mainly apes to see how the body was built and how it worked. He was one of the first to figure out that by clamping the ureters on living apes it made the kidneys swell. By doing that he was able to come to the conclusion that the kidneys produced urine. He would also experiment by surgically cutting or stimulating various nerves of the spin and by doing that he figured out what organs and muscles those nerves