INTRODUCTION

For all Galen's many faces – medical scientist, public dissector and demonstrator, psychologist and moral philosopher, logician, linguist, commentator, lexicographer and literary critic, pharmacologist, historian of thought and story-teller – we should not forget that he regarded himself primarily as an iatros, a healer of patients and a restorer and preserver of health. Indeed, the principal job (ergon) or aim (skopos) of the medical art, he repeatedly says, is the treatment of disease and the preservation of health; and it is his primary responsibility as a doctor to carry out that job in an indefinite number of particular cases. For while most other areas of Galen's activity are of a theoretical nature and aimed at attaining knowledge and understanding of universal truths, healing is by definition a practical activity concerned with individual patients constituting particular cases of illness.

Yet in spite of its fundamental importance, Galen's therapeutics has, as far as I am aware, never received anything remotely aspiring to a comprehensive scholarly treatment. The reason for this is not difficult to see. Therapeutics is, in a way, the summa of all of Galen's other activities: it both presupposes them and is their culmination.