criticise a number of his teachings, and especially those which, as he believed, were not stated with sufficient clearness. Valuable as was the service rendered to medicine by the writing of these commentaries, there still remained an urgent need for a service of a different and much more difficult kind, viz., that of welding together into a single clearly written and easily intelligible system of medicine, all that was good in the Hippocratic writings and in the disconnected and at times antagonistic teachings of the sects. To accomplish this successfully required the services of a man endowed with mental gifts of a most exceptional character—complete knowledge of medicine in all its departments, a mind thoroughly trained in philosophy, the power to express his thoughts in simple language, and an independence and fairness of judgment which would render him indifferent to the petty interests of the sects. Claudius Galen, as subsequent events showed, possessed these very gifts in a high degree, and he devoted the better part of his reasonably long lifetime to the accomplishment of this much-needed work. How greatly it was needed at that particular period of time, nobody then knew or could even suspect. It soon appeared, however, that all the vaunted civilization of the Graeco-Roman world—much of it of the purest gold and a great deal of the basest alloy—was to be swept so completely off the face of the earth that, for thirteen hundred or more years, almost no thought whatever could possibly be given to the science and art of medicine. Fortunate, most fortunate it was, therefore, that, before this wave of destruction reached Rome, all the best part of Greek medical literature—for such it was in truth—had been gathered together and carefully systematized by Galen and stowed away in the recesses and chambers of remotely situated monasteries and churches by clear-sighted monks for the benefit of later generations of physicians.
Brief Biographical Sketch.—Claudius Galen was born in Pergamum, an important Greek city of Asia Minor, about the year 131 A. D., under the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. His father, whose name was Nicon, was a man
