Galen the great scientist.: Unveiling the Minds Behind Revolutionary Discoveries”
Galen was born in the year 129 after Christ, on the island of Pergamum in Asia Minor. Asia Minor is a peninsula located between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, separated from Greece by the Aegean Sea in the middle. In the Archaic era, this peninsula has been mostly under the subjection of Turkey, but in the days of Galen it was among the richest regions of the civilized world. Then there was the influence of the Roman state and Rome then administered it with great wisdom and beauty.
Galen’s educated father was Greek. He had expertise in arithmetic, geometry and astrology. He was a mathematician as well as an architect. The father had a great and decisive influence on the son. Because of that, scientificity came in his attitude, in his life. “Truth alone should be worshipped. Father’s teaching was. Listened and thought about it after listening. There is no need to follow any idea and community.” On the other hand, the influence of the mother was also no less. From her he learned patience, learned to control himself, learned to think carefully before uttering anything. Education is mother. But she herself was a short-tempered woman, with the result that Galen decided that he would never listen to his mother.
By the fourteenth year, as was the custom in those days. Galen was educated at home only. In the 15th year, he was sent to various centers of learning to listen to lectures, so that he could select the epics of Greek philosophers. When Galen turned seventeen, it was decided somewhere that he had to become a doctor; And the surprise is that this important question of determining the life direction of the child was resolved on the basis of a dream! In those days people used to have a lot of faith in the reality of dreams, even people of well-educated and settled thoughts like Galen and his father fully accepted them.
Galen studied medicine by visiting famous experts of those days. For this he had to go to country-abroad-Pergamum, Smyrna, Corinth. Then all the subjects were taught to a student – geometry,
Astronomy, music, linguistics and Ayurveda – all were studied by Galen. mindfully
His student life continued for twenty-nine years. Even in those days this was considered a long time. Well, on returning home, he started practicing and got considerable success in it. On the other hand, invitations started coming to him from Rome to heal the gladiators. ‘Gladiators’ people used to fight with sword in hand with the aim of killing each other. It was a favorite game of the Romans. But he had objection to the dissection of the human body. Galen took advantage of his position, and continued his surgical studies there.
Galen did very important and extensive research in both anatomy and physiology. Twenty one voluminous books of thousands of pages of his researches are preserved. By law, he could not study the anatomy of human completely, he completed that task by studying the anatomy of 31 monkeys. The page-page of these books is the introduction of Galen’s explorations. Micro
Galen studied the heart—examined its folds, determined the strength of its muscles, and documented the activity of its valves. He had almost come close to a theory of how blood travels through the body, when a wrong assumption distorted all his research, that is, the blood somehow seeps from the right side of the heart through the middle wall. reaches the other side. Not only this, he had identified the main blood vessels as well, but he could not decide that what is that regulatory ‘vahini’ which unites both the processes ‘from the heart’ and ‘toward the heart’. His idea was that these blue-blue and red-red veins carried blood out of the heart and then back to the heart by some unknown, erratic instinct.
In the matter of the nervous system too, Galen had reached very close to our modern knowledge. He had realized that it is these nadis which themselves or through the sushumna nadi, transmit the sense-perception to the brain. On the animals, by piercing their spinal cords at various places, he did many tests and found how that innocent dumb animal has become incapable of properly performing many rituals of the body. a phrenic nerve (phrenic neoplasm)
He had rightly experienced the damage that could be caused by its being cut off. This is the nadi which regulates the movement of the lungs in the process of breathing.
Galen had also recognized that how the movement of the navajna gives accurate information about the patient’s condition, and also that this pulse-pulsation can also be an indicator of the person’s inner state, emotion-land. Could It was as if he had a foreknowledge of Mendel’s breeding theories, because he also revealed that children often resemble their grandparents more than their parents in appearance. And he also observed that in the condition of sweating, even if we do not feel it, our whole body is getting watery.
• More than 1500 years passed, but the belief of the medical world remained that there could be no error in Galen’s principles. If any one objected to him, it would mean that now neither his patient nor any associate doctor would listen to him. And this when Galen himself orders never to blindly accept any conclusion without examination.
In the 16th century, a Belgian doctor, Andreas Vesalius, conducted several tests on human anatomy and tried to undermine Galen’s authenticity. But a century later, when William Harvey came along and published his experiments on blood flow, Galen’s influence began to wane somewhat in the medical field. In the time of Vesalius, if any research on anatomy seemed to indicate that there was some error in Galen, then the experts of medicine would have said that this body of ours has changed since Galen’s time; Galen can do no wrong!
Galen would never have accepted this enslavement of the intellect, even if it was towards his own texts.
The words of famous physician Galen are-
I would say that even after me, if scientist If one has the passion to be, and has the lust to reach the bottom of the truth, then he should not try to reach any conclusion with haste from only two or three examples. To the inquisitor, the realization will often come only after a long experience like mine.”
Galen’s ‘Anatomical Exercises’, who is counted among the archangels of the world and who is considered the father of anatomy, is the encyclopedia of medicine that really took medicine to a new turn – a living of a Karmayogi life Memorial, and the ‘final proof’ for doctors, which has been going on for almost 15 centuries. The importance of Galen’s quoted words increases for us today when we find in them echoes of the modern method of testing truth by experiment, and the principle of multiple tests of conclusions.