Talk:Galen

message: This has grown in classic Wiki fashion with random statements inserted without regard to overall structure, many of which were duplicative, non-sequiturs, or contradictory. I have cleaned up a fair bit of it after consulting sources, and separated biography from appraisal of work, and added more sources Mgoodyear (talk) 11:19, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Good work. Power.corrupts (talk) 12:22, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

text: As the string "leav" (my search was case-independent) produces only 2 (unrelated) hits, it would be great if Mg..y..r, or someone else who understands, "paid off" the talk-section heading "Leaves" by explaining how this talk section is about departures, or pages, or the photosynthetic organs of the Plantae. (I was just looking for any connection between the physician and the lead ore galena, so i've got only an ant, not a dog, in this fight.)--Jerzy•t 03:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, since he mentions a bibliography, Mgoodyear must have meant leaves of books, but he can certainly speak for himself. The Galenic corpus article is already in place. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:45, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Structure

message: I suggest that once all the cited works are sorted into a bibliography, that we move it to a separate Galenic Corpus in the same way that Hippocrates is organised. Mgoodyear (talk) 19:30, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: As the string "leav" (my search was case-independent) produces only 2 (unrelated) hits, it would be great if Mg..y..r, or someone else who understands, "paid off" the talk-section heading "Leaves" by explaining how this talk section is about departures, or pages, or the photosynthetic organs of the Plantae. (I was just looking for any connection between the physician and the lead ore galena, so i've got only an ant, not a dog, in this fight.)--Jerzy•t 03:30, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  Well, since he mentions a bibliography, Mgoodyear must have meant leaves of books, but he can certainly speak for himself. The Galenic corpus article is already in place. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:45, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Leaves

message: Sources in footnotes should be primary or secondary (scholarly) sources not unsubstantiated tertiary sources, some of which use Wikipedia as their source! These have been removed and moved to external links, otherwise Wikipedia as no greater authority than any other website that mentions the topic. Mgoodyear (talk) 15:10, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Sources

message: I don't think his contributions to Islamic thought and medicine are truly appreciated here, also there lacks a citation. I will look for substantiation and a fix RBSeven (talk) 19:17, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: comments

message: The paragraph referring to public dissections is contradictory. At first it mentions that "One of his methods was to publicly dissect a living pig ..." but then it goes on to say "Crucially, he never dissected animals in public ...". Could someone clarify this issue? --GringoInChile 16:38, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I also noticed this contradiction... does anyone who is actually familiar with Galen want to remedy it? If not I am just going to remove both parts. Dunne409 03:07, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If nobody does fix it soon, maybe the paragraph could be commented out rather than completely removed in case someone does come along at a latter date to clarify the matter --GringoInChile 08:21, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

text: I agree--GringoInChile 19:39, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Public dissections

message: There is no mention of any of his works in this article. It says he writes but what did he write? It also doesn't mention what kind of experimenting he did with the brain.
Maybe after I finish my term paper this weekend I'll work on it.
But no promises.Aether24 06:56, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expansion 

message: There's nothing here about Galen's ideas about the circulatory system - ie/ blood being made in the liver, seeping out, being 'used up'. Whilst these ideas have now been proved wrong, they were accepted as the truth for a very long time, until the time of William Harvey - early 1600s. Wattylfc 17:11, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing

message: Was he born in 128 (first line) or 129 (category)? Every WP seems to offer its own year. --Eleassar my talk 09:47, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My 1984 Encyclopedia Britannica says 129. The article had 129 until September 19th, when an anon IP editor changed it to 128, with no other changes or edit summary. I've changed it back to 129 And added referencing. Studerby 10:35, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Year of birth

message: This section is wildly inaccurate and misleading.  It claims:
As for the Western Christians, they abolished surgery in both knowledge and practice: it was pagan and it was a sin.[4]
The source cited does say this (near the end of the article), but provides no evidence for it.  On the contrary, it attributes the decline in medical knowledge and practice to the destruction of the Roman empire by the barbarian invasions:
The destruction of the library at Alexandria coincided with the end of the Roman empire. One of the reasons for Rome’s decline and fall was a lack of central authority – the long-distance networks simply fell apart. And the same thing happened with medicine. It was not that medicine wasn’t still practised, but there was no longer a great centre.
And when the centre of medical knowledge disappeared, the loss rippled through the empire. Everywhere great medical works disappeared, either deliberately destroyed or simply lost to time.
The source cited goes on to point out that Galen's writings were not only accepted by the church, but held in reverentially high esteem:
Even more unfortunately, many of his other theories (none of which had any medical validity) and his huge number of remedies (none especially useful) were used by doctors for centuries, becoming the medical equivalent of holy writ. In fact, they later became part of Church dogma.
Finally, and most ironic of all, the source cited states that Galen (not Christianity), was almost singlehandedly responsible for crippling Western medical knowledge:
The egotistical Galen would probably have been pleased to know that he effectively held back the advancement of medicine for centuries.
Saying that Western Christians 'abolished surgery in both knowledge and practice', because they believed 'it was pagan and it was a sin', is not only completely inaccurate but contradicted by the article's own statements.  I would like to see a proper source cited, not this nonsense.
[I have added a link to a BBC article discussin an archaeological find from Yorkshire (10th-11th century] with an actual example of "Dark Age" cranial surgery saving a man that had received a critical head blow. Overall, the entire "legacy" section needs a complete rewrite to avoid being entirely inaccurate.]
This section in the article also represents Vesalius as being the uncritical and enthusiastic supporter of Galen's theories, whereas in fact Vesalius corrected Galen's many errors regarding human anatomy, because Vesalius was permitted by the Christian government to carry out autopsies on human bodies, which Galen never did.  Galen was forbidden by pagan Roman law to dissect human bodies, and his theories on human anatomy were based on dissecting animals and guessing that they were identical to humans.  --Taiwan boi (talk) 02:32, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Legacy

message: I wanted to check with all the people that have been working on this, but I think it  is time his legacy section gets turned into that first paragraph as a quick blurb and a main article that adresses the legacy as a whole titled "Galenic Medicine" or "Galenism" or something. I am pretty sure their is enough information on both the Arabic and Western uses of his medicine to make such a change.  If I don't get a response soon I will move it on my own accord. SADADS (talk) 00:10, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Moving Legacy Section into a new article

message: In the section headed 'Work', the link to Hippocrates' humoral theories at the end of the first paragraph links to humour as in 'sense of humour', hilarity etc. Could someone please rectify this?
86.136.23.93 (talk) 01:07, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to humoral theory 

message: This article claims: "So profuse was Galen's output that the surviving texts represent nearly half of all the extant literature from ancient Greece.[22][44]" This is patently false! (Aristotle's extent works alone, for example, rival Galen's in total length.) A major contemporary Galen scholar estimates that it might be as high as 10% of extent Greek literature up to 350 AD. (Links below; the source is far more reputable than the medical journals cited.) See, for example: p. 390, n 22 here (requires university access): http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/nlebk_105841_AN?sid=f3be728f-9855-4065-943d-b707fc267e5d@sessionmgr111&vid=1&format=EB 
As noted in the article, the rest of the information in the paragraph is contested and, frankly, sounds highly speculative (like wildly inaccurate remnants from the doxographical tradition). We might consider removing that (mis-)information until/if a reputable source can be found. 99.112.125.90 (talk) 14:02, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Output 

message: Projecting contemporary understandings of terms like "science" back almost 2000 years is really bad history. In good histories, the word "science" is generally not applied to what people did before the 17th or 18th centuries because it's seriously misleading. Joechip123 (talk) 03:33, 13 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Using science to describe what he did is bad history 

message: Contrary to the title, the body of the section indicates that Galen's works were translated by a Syrian Christian.  Thus, was it Christian medicine or Islamic medicine that was being practiced, and to what extent did Islam influence the development?  The fact that the documents were translated into Arabic does not necessarily mean that the translators or users were Muslim.John Paul Parks (talk) 23:19, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I hope that this diff clears up the confusion (or rather, avoids invalid and confusing essentialism about what is, or is not, Islamic medicine). Richard Keatinge (talk) 12:37, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I have also removed the tag. Richard Keatinge (talk) 14:29, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Influence on Islamic Medicine

message: In the section Galen#Contributions to medicine, 2nd paragraph, the claim is made that "... Roman law had prohibited the dissection of human cadavers since about 150 BC".  The reference is to somebody else making the same claim ... not to an actual source that supports the claim.  I'm not quite sure how to tag it.  It's not citation needed, as there is a source, just not a good one.  It's also not unreliable source, as I'm not questioning the reliability of the source ... it's just not a good one that backs up the claim, it just repeats it.  What I would like to see is a reference to the Roman law in question and a better date for it.
73.219.226.54 (talk) 18:13, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Looking for a better source in Contributions to medicine 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: At present (2018 March 26) the lede section reads:
Galen's theory of the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged until 1221, when Ibn al-Nafis published his encyclopedia of medicine entitled As-Shamil fi Tibb, in which he reported his discovery of the pulmonary circulation.[12]
This sentence contains some errors:
(1)  According to Wikipedia's article on Ibn al-Nafis, he was born in 1213, in which case he would have been about 8 years old in 1221.  It's unlikely that an 8-year-old boy would have discovered the true nature of pulmonary circulation and published a criticism and correction of Galen.  (Even the reference that the quoted sentence cites, claims that Ibn al-Nafis was born in 1210, in which case he would have been 11 years old in 1221.)
(2)  A source that's cited in Wikipedia's article "Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon" states that Ibn al-Nafis was 29 when he published his theory of pulmonary circulation – in which case his theory would have been published ca. 1242, not 1221.
(3)  In the "Discovery of Pulmonary Circulation" section of Wikipedia's article on Ibn al-Nafis, the text states that Ibn al-Nafis' theory of pulmonary circulation appeared in his book Sharh tashrih al-qanun li’ Ibn Sina (Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon), not in his encyclopedia As-Shamil fi Tibb.  This claim is reiterated in Wikipedia's article "Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon".
Therefore I am revising the above quoted sentence to read:
"Galen's theory of the physiology of the circulatory system remained unchallenged until ca. 1242, when Ibn al-Nafis published his book Sharh tashrih al-qanun li’ Ibn Sina (Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon), in which he reported his discovery of the pulmonary circulation."West, John (1985). "Ibn al-Nafis, the pulmonary circulation, and the Islamic Golden Age". Journal of Applied Physiology. 105 (6):  1877–1880.
VexorAbVikipædia (talk) 14:52, 26 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pulmonary circulation:  Ibn al-Nafis' correction of Galen 

message: I've removed a couple of references to oxygen, which was not discovered unitl many centuries later. But perhaps someone more knowledgeable could review the relevant passages more generally. --rossb (talk) 16:41, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oxygen 

message: The history of 'Galen' is highly contested. 'Its' works clearly are from multiple writers. 
It's as if in 2000 years from now, they think Lancet was a super human medic who changed medicine in the 20th & 21st century. 
Who along with the Nature and there family whose children who each specialised in a specific area such as Neuroscience. 82.6.88.43 (talk) 17:36, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Galen was not a single person. It was a journal with many contributors