On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

Hardly any writer of the Greeks, if you except Aristotle, has had an authority as widespread and as long-flourishing as that of the physician Claudius Galenus. For after the fall of the Roman Empire, his studies were not kept confined to the borders of the Byzantines and reduced to the same slenderness as the studies of other Greeks, but they dwelt in the West; what is more, they even passed to the Syrians, to the Persians, to the Arabs, and having taken new growth from there, they flowed back to the European nations. Nor were they cultivated for the sake of amusing the mind or refining the intellect, or so that the knowledge of ancient things and letters might be recovered, but with this purpose, that such doctrine might be acquired which would be of the greatest value for the use and utility of human life, since it was concerned both with perceiving the structure, powers, and faculties of the human body and with restoring and preserving health. In this, the name of Galen was so great that for more than ten centuries no one dared, or indeed even thought, to move a finger's breadth, as they say, away from his doctrine and precepts: with such wondrous power did Galen hold the minds of men bound to himself.

But the form of such a great empire, remaining for so many centuries and pertaining to such diverse peoples, was varied and manifold. Among the Byzantines, indeed, almost only those things which had been excerpted by Oribasius, that physician to Julian (Caesar original: "Caesaris") Julian the Apostate, and other ancient physicians came into use, for which reason not much effort and labor was spent on the books of Galen himself; and in the times of Paul of Aegina—who flourished c. 660 AD—they did not even wish to read those selected passages, because either

Refers to: Bussemaker, U. C., and Daremberg, C. E., Oeuvres d'Oribase, Vol. I, p. XXXIII; Häser, H., Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin (Jena 1853), § 144, 2.