Galen's Psychology

Galen (a.D. 129-99), the most famous medical figure of the GraecoRoman period, was second only to Hippocrates as the greatest physician of antiquity. Unlike the "Father of Medicine," who divulged almost nothing about his own life and personality, Galen interspersed his medical writings with much detailed autobiographical information. And while there is great uncertainty about the actual authorship of the seventy books attributed to Hippocrates, there is little doubt that the four hundred separate treatises that bear Galen's name are actually from his pen. Galen's competence and interests far surpassed those of a general practitioner; by the standards of his day, he attained the skill of a specialist in a variety of fields, from the fundamental preclinical sciences to the practice of internal medicine and surgery. However, ifwe may judge by his writings, his medical ministration rarely touched upon psychiatry, although we also learn from his books that his insight concerning the human psyche was penetrating and profound. It is this very paradox—his preoccupation with the psyche and his dearth of reports on patients with psychic disturbances—that makes an analysis of his psychological insights especially intriguing. A few of his case histories make it evident that he was quite aware of the psychic components of somatic illness, the most famous of these being about an ailing lady: I was called in to see a woman who was stated to be sleepless at night and to lie tossing about from one position into another. Finding she had no fever, I made a detailed inquiry into everything that had happened to her, especially considering such factors as we know to cause insomnia. But she either answered little or nothing at all, as if to show that it