For almost fifteen hundred years, Galen of Pergamum
(130—ca. 200 A.D.) was the virtually undisputed authority
in medical matters. He composed, it is said, nearly five
hundred treatises in anatomy, physiology, and pathology,
and such varied felds as logic, ethics, and grammar, as well
as therapeutic and clinical works. His scientific approach to
anatomy and his use of inductive reasoning in the diagnosis
of disease made him the unquestioned "Prince of Physicians"
until the early sixteenth century.
The present volume offers for the first time in English
translation his two works in the field of "moral philosophy,"
an area that, in the manner in which he approaches them,
makes them contributions to that part of medicine known
today as psychotherapy.
It was Galen's thesis that passion and moral error were
diseases, but diseases of the soul and not the body, and
that the physician treating a patient suffering from a "diseased soul" must attack the passion or error directly and
immediately—an approach that has had a profound infiuence
on the subsequent treatment of mental disorder.