Tag Archives: Galen of Pergamon

Lumbar puncture

August 15, 2022

JMS Pearce Hull, England   Fig 1. Dominici Cotugno’s De Ischiade Nervosa, 1764. 1770. Access to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in life as an aid to diagnosis proved impossible until lumbar puncture. Galen of Pergamon (AD 130–200) failed to recognize CSF; he described a vaporous, not aqueous, humor that he called περιττώματα (residues) in the cerebral ventricles. […]

Experimental evidence for the humoral circulatory system

February 6, 2020

Mark A. Gray  Kansas City, Kansas   Four Humors from the Book of Alchemy by Thurn-Heisser, Leipzig, Germany (1574). Via Wikimedia. Public domain. Humoralism, otherwise known as Hellenistic or Galenic medicine, posited the existence of four humors that were required to be kept in balance to maintain health. Blood was special among these humors, believed […]

The Red Cross and hematology pioneers

January 22, 2020

Barnabas Pastory Dar es Salaam, Tanzania   The Red Cross and the Red Crescent emblems at the museum in Geneva. Photo by Julius.kusuma on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0. Providing medical care to suffering humankind constitutes an important part of the Red Cross’ service scope. History records an important connection between the Red Cross and pioneers […]

Galen, macaques, and the growth of the discipline of human anatomy

October 29, 2018

Goran Štrkalj Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia   Introduction Figure 1. Galen of Pergamon (from the 1820 lithograph by PR Vignéron). The year 2018 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Cayo Santiago rhesus monkey colony. This exemplary research unit epitomizes scientific excellence in experimenting on non-human primates and in using them as models to understand the […]

Pig man: pigs in medicine from Galen to transgenic xenotransplantation

January 30, 2017

Stanley Gutiontov Chicago, Illinois, United States   The bad rap “And the pig, though it has a split hoof completely divided, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.” —Leviticus 11:7 Slaughtering of a pig Pig: a word variably defined as “a young domesticated swine not yet sexually mature” or “a dirty, gluttonous, […]

The boys’ club

January 30, 2017

Laura Hirshbein Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States   Galen of Pergamon, the most famous medical researcher of classical antiquity Lithograph by Pierre Roche Vigneron, c. 1865. In 1914, a group of fraternity men from the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, decided they needed more influence at the school. One of the […]