Galen

129–c. 216 CE

Galen of Pergamum, physician to gladiators and then to Marcus Aurelius and his successors at Rome, was the most prolific writer of antiquity and the master of medicine for fifteen hundred years. He joined the Hippocratic tradition to the anatomy of Alexandria and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle; On the Natural Faculties sets out his physiology of nutrition, growth and the attraction, retention and expulsion by which each organ does its work.