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GALENUS.

CLAUDIUS GALENUS of Pergamos, was born about the 131st year of the Christian era, and lived in high repute at Rome during the reigns of the Emperors Hadrianus and Marcus Antoninus, by the latter of whom he was much esteemed, having been his physician, and, during his absence with the army, entrusted with the guardianship of his son.

Galen is said to have travelled extensively in early life, and to have studied medicine at Alexandria, famous above all other cities in his day for its medical school. Piously disposed by nature, we cannot suppose that he had not heard something of the doctrines of the Jewish Sect called Christians, then beginning to be noticed in the world; but he never professed himself as having belonged to them, any more than did the pious Emperor under whom he lived. Galen must have read the Hebrew Scriptures, however, for he criticizes Moses, and does not entirely agree with him as to the omnipotence of the Jewish Deity. To the will of God," he says, "there was always added considerations for that which was fittest

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or best. It was not that God willed a certain arrangement of parts about the eyelids; he chose the firm cartilaginous structures we find there. Neither could he have proceeded of a sudden to make a man of a stone; and herein our opinion agrees with that of Plato and others among the Greeks, who have written on the Nature of things, which differs from that of Moses, who thinks that God, had he so willed, could at once have made a horse or an ox out of ashes. But we are not of this way of thinking; we acknowledge that there are some things which nature could not do, which indeed would never be attempted; whilst of what could be done, choice was made of the best." A sentence in which we see combined the Leibnitzian idea of "the best of all possible worlds," and something like the something like the more modern doctrine of "Evolution, with survival of the fittest."

Galen himself says expressly, that his work on the Use of the parts of the human body is "nothing less than a hymn to the Creator-Ego Conditori nostro verum hymnum compono-and I hold that true piety is not shown in the sacrifice of hecatombs of bulls, or in raising clouds of fragrant incense; but in studying myself to know, and in making known to others, the wisdom, the power and the goodness of God." (De usu Partium, lib. iii.) Surely very beautiful in one living under the shadow of Temples dedicated to Jupiter and Minerva; more reasonable withal, perhaps,

than the Cultus of more than one kind now prevailing in the world.

In this truly great man we meet with the anatomical, physiological, and medical genius of the ancient world, although it has been conclusively shown that Galen's knowledge, whether of structure or function, was not derived from any study of the body of man, but from inspection of the bodies of the lower animals. That he had seen the human skeleton, however, is admitted; and, for the rest, it matters little, as we now know, whether it was from man or beast that the immense amount of interesting anatomical and physiological information he accumulated and transmitted to us was derived.

To this acute and most accomplished man the heart was the most important of all the organs of the body

-source of the native heat, and storehouse of the subtle blood replete with vital spirits, by which the whole of the organism was actuated. The heart, he says, is as it were a lamp alight in the middle of the body, the blood being the oil that feeds the flame, and the inbreathed air that which keeps it burning. Respiration consequently is instituted to keep the flame of the heart alive, and to engender the vital spirit, not, as was believed by Erasistratus, to fill the arteries with air in substance. (Lib. de Utilitate Respirationis.)

The flesh of the heart, says Galen, is not exactly the same as that of the muscles of voluntary motion;

neither when boiled has it the, same taste as these; neither like them is it under the control of the will. The arrangement of its fibres is also peculiar, some of the bundles running longitudinally and others transversely; the former by their contractions shortening the organ, the latter compressing and narrowing it— words which show that Galen did really regard the heart as essentially muscular.

The valvular apparatus of the heart is fully described, and its action thoroughly appreciated, by Galen; although certain hypothetical ideas force him to speak of the action as less perfect than it is in reality. Made up of auricles and ventricles in warmblooded animals, the auricles, he says, exist for the sake of the lungs; the ventricles for the sake of the blood and vital spirits; neither auricles nor ventricles, however, in their alternate dilations and contractions, have the motion of the blood for their object, or if they do influence this, as is by-and-by admitted to be the case, it is the diastole or expansion of the organ, not the systole or contraction, that comes into efficient play.

When the heart dilates, it puts the membranulæ within it on the stretch, opens the orifices of the intromitting, and closes those of the emitting, vessels; yet not so completely as to oppose all escape of lighter or more subtle matters. It is to this end, therefore,

that whilst one of the

two great corresponding

ventricular orifices is guarded by three membranes,

the other that namely of the arteria venosa or pulmonary vein is not so effectually cared for; vein—is inasmuch as by it the fuliginous or excrementitious matter of the blood has to find a passage from the heart to the lungs and be emitted with the breath.'

"From the arrangement of the valves, here,” he proceeds, "one might think that nothing could return by any of the other three orifices. But the thing is not so in reality; for as the blood and spirit are in course of being drawn into the heart at the moment when the valves are coming into action, something may escape or be remitted before they fully and finally close. With the more powerful motions of the heart especially, something more than vapour or spirit, some blood in substance, may escape. The blood of the arteries being of a thinner, purer, and more vapourous nature than that of the veins, might seem to facilitate the escape in question. So much at all events is certain: that if the arteries of the heart impart something to it, that which is imparted must needs be returned to them by its action; even as the arteries of the body, sucking in from all the parts, must, by contracting, remit to them again."

1" Quod igitur cor, quo tempore dilatatur, membranarum trahens radices aperit quidem intromittentium materias vasorum orificia, claudet autem educentium; ne minus etiam quod trahentibus omnibus læviora expeditius obsequuntur; quodque in aliis quidem orificiis membranæ tres incumbant; in arteriæ venosæ orificio non item; quod eam solam excrementis fuliginosis quæ a corde feruntur ad pulmonem dare transitum oportet." (De usu Partium, lib. vi., cap. 14, 15.)

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