Galen (129–CA. 199/216)

Greek physician and philosopher

Galen was a physician from Asia Minor who practiced on both gladiators and rulers, serving as physician to four emperors. He was also a philosopher and author who wrote more than 350 works in Greek on subjects ranging from anatomy to deontology, from philosophy to poetry, from pathology to therapy. He was a vigorous advocate of the tradition of Hippocrates but was equally eager to display his own innovative knowledge and investigations. In particular, Galen enhanced the concept of the four humors as a system of explanation for diseases.

At once arrogant and brilliant, Galen, through his texts and ideas, had a profound influence on elite Western medicine until the nineteenth century, although observations by anatomists and physiologists starting in the sixteenth century (e.g., those of Andreas Vesalius [1514–1564]) began to undercut the power of his ideas.

Galen's descriptions of disabling conditions ranged from fractures and paralyses to visual impairments and epilepsy, while his therapeutic interventions embraced dietary changes, fractured limb reductions, and bloodletting. He helped differentiate the trachea and the larynx, thus allowing speech disorders to be pathologized. Galen publicly demonstrated the function of the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which innervates the voice box. He cut the nerve in a squealing pig and thereby “removed” its voice, thus demonstrating both a refined physiological sensitivity and the use of impairment as a marker of physiological dysfunction. Galen's influence on disability, by way of medicine, is at once distant and profound.