Legacy of Galen, or Tradition, tradition! (Part 3)

I was reading some time ago the biography of Aelius Galenus, aka Claudius Galenus, aka Galen of Pergamum, known to most of people today simply as Galen, the famous doctor and anatomist of Roman Empire. Now, the figure of Galen is near and dear to the hearts of all students of Chassidus Chabad, since anatomy and physiology that can be found in the works of Chassidus (e.g., Tanya — including the famous descriptions of compartments of the heart, one’s seed coming from one’s brain, etc.) is borrowed from Galen.

But that’s not the reason that I am mentioning him today. As one could tell from a series of a few recent posts, I have been pondering for a while about the role of tradition in the life of a human being, a Jew, a Chossid and an amateur philatelist. Some of my thoughts are more positive, some are more negative (positive and negative in what aspect, you ask? good question...), some are more traditional (no pun intended), some are more heretical. After this meta-paragraph, let me present to you the part of Galen’s biography that caught my attention, namely, his legacy (you can skip to the bottom line after the quotes if you so desire):

Galen, for all his mistakes, remained an unchallenged authority in his lifetime, and his work established a legacy that continued for over a thousand years. In his day Galen said everything there was to be said on anatomy. According to reports he kept as many as 20 scribes on staff to write down his every dictum. When he died in 203 CE, serious anatomical and physiological research ground to a halt.

Although he was not a Christian, Galen’s writings reflect a belief in only one G-d, and he declared that the body was an instrument of the soul. This made him acceptable both to the fathers of the church and to Arab and Hebrew scholars. Galen’s mistakes perpetuated fundamental errors for nearly fifteen hundred years.

 Wikipedia’s entry on Galen’s legacy confirms this:

In his time, Galen's reputation as both physician and philosopher was legendary. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius describing him as "Primum sane medicorum esse, philosophorum autem solum" (first among doctors and unique among philosophers — Praen 14: 660). Other contemporary authors in the Greek world confirm this including Theodotus the Shoemaker, Athenaeus and Alexander of Aphrodisias. [...] Galen continued to exert an important influence over the theory and practice of medicine until the mid seventeenth century in the Byzantine and Arabic worlds and Europe. [...]

Galen's rhetoric and prolificity were so powerful as to convey the impression that there was little left to learn. The term Galenism has subsequently taken on both a positive and pejorative meaning as one that transformed medicine in late antiquity yet so dominated subsequent thinking as to stifle further progress. [...]

After the collapse of the Western Empire the study of Galen and other Greek works almost disappeared in the Latin West. In contrast, in the predominantly Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire (Byzantium), many commentators of the subsequent centuries, such as Oribasius, physician to the emperor Julian who compiled a Synopsis in the 4th Century, preserved and disseminated Galen's works, making Galenism more accessible. Nutton refers to these authors as the "medical refrigerators of antiquity". In late antiquity medical writing veered increasingly in the direction of the theoretical at the expense of the practical. Many authors merely debating Galenism. Magnus of Nisibis was a pure theorist, as was John of Alexandria and Agnellus of Ravenna with their lectures on Galen's De Sectis. So strong was Galenism that other authors such as Hippocrates began to be seen through a Galenic lens, while his opponents became marginalised and other medical sects such as Asclepiadism slowly disappeared. [...]

From the 11th century onwards, Latin translations of Islamic medical texts began to appear in the West, alongside the Salerno school of thought, and were soon incorporated into teaching at the universities of Naples and Montpellier. Galenism now took on a new unquestioned authority, Galen even being referred to as the "Medical Pope of the Middle Ages". Constantine the African was amongst those who carried out translations of both Hippocrates and Galen from Arabic. In addition to the more numerous translations of Arabic texts in this period, there were a few translations of Galenic works directly from the Greek, such as Burgundio of Pisa's translation of De complexionibus. Galen's works on anatomy and medicine became the mainstay of the medieval physician's university curriculum, alongside Ibn Sina's The Canon of Medicine which elaborated on Galen's works. Unlike pagan Rome, Christian Europe did not exercise a universal prohibition of the dissection and autopsy of the human body and such examinations were carried out regularly from at least the 13th century. However, Galen's influence, as in the Arab world, was so great that when dissections discovered anomalies in Galen's anatomy, the physicians often tried to fit these into the Galenic system. An example of this is Mondino de Liuzzi, who describes rudimentary blood circulation in his writings but still asserts that the left ventricle should contain air.

Bottom line: Galen was so successful in his life, presented such a revolution in understanding of anatomy and physiology that he became a solid authority in medicine, an authority whom it became increasingly difficult to challenge. As a result, from the time right after Galen’s death until late Renaissance, advances in medicine and human biology were stifled by Galen’s own success in these fields!

I think it is either an interesting historical fact or a cautionary tale. The morale of the story is different for each person and each area of application.