Roman Medicine:An Ancient Practice

By the first century BC, the centre of civilization shifted to Rom. The Romans borrowed their medicine largely from the Greeks whom they had conquered. While the politics of the world became Roman, medicine remained Greek. In the political philosophy of the romans the state and not the individual was supreme. The Romans were a more practical- minded people than the Greeks. They had a keen since of sanitation. Public health was born in Rom with development of Baths, sewers and Aqueducts . The Romans made fine roads through out their empire, Brought pure water to all their cities. Through Aqueducts, drained marshes to combat Malaria, Boilt sewerage systems and established hospitals for the sick.

An outstanding figure among Roman medical teachers was Galen (130-205AD) who was born in the Greek city of pergamon in Asia minor (now Turkey). He was physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. His important contributions were in the field of comparative anatomy and experimental physiology. Galen was far ahead of his time in his views about health and diseases. About health he stated; “Since both in importants and intime, health precedes disease, so we out to consider first how health may be preserved and then how one may based cure disease” about disease Galen observed that disease is due to three factors- Predisposing, exciting and environmental factors, a truly modern idea. The doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen were often in conflict since their approaches were so different- one is synthetic, the other analytic. An author of some 500 treatises on medical subjects, Galen was literally a “ Medical dictato”r in his time, and also for a long time there – after. His writings influenced Europian medicine. They were accepted as standard text books in medicine for 14 centuries till his teaching and views were challenged by the anatomist, Vesalius in 1543, and the physiologist, William Harvey in 1628, almost 1500 years after his death. 


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