☑ DIAGNOSED USING BLOOD SAMPLES
☑ PERFORMED CATARACT SURGERY
☑ HIS TEXT BOOKS WERE COPIED GLOBALLY
Greek doctor Galen hurries through the streets of Rome, heading to a villa where a sick young man struggles for his life. The 25-year-old is running a high fever, and has already been treated by other doctors for three days. But their recommendation of fasting has made his condition worse.
The Greek doctor acts quickly. He checks the strength and frequency of the man’s pulse rate, and sees that he has a ‘face of death’, characterised by sunken eyes. Galen is sure that a fever attack is rising – and that the man will urgently need nourishment, not the prescribed fast, to survive.
“As quickly as possible, I prepared a porridge of groats,” he notes. A few hours later, as Galen had expected, the patient experiences a fever attack and his pulse rate weakens. The Greek doctor returns each day for a week to feed the patient porridge with pomegranate seeds, and the attacks ease.
But the other doctors are not convinced – their prescribed fast would have worked, they claim. Galen “cannot stand their babbling any longer,” he notes in his records. So he stops allowing the patient food and drink and invites his rivals to stay at the sickbed and observe the result of their preferred treatment. After a short while, the patient starts choking, and his
