Medical History VI:  Medicine in Ancient Rome. How Galen, building on the Greeks, set medicine for the next 1000 years

“The Greatest Benefit to Mankind – A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present” by Roy Porter was published in 1999. It’s a magnificent 848-page book that I’ve now read. Many people, I’ve discovered, own a copy but have dipped into it rather than read it through. I hope that I might do medical history, the world at large, students of medicine (surely all of us), and Roy, whom I knew and who died suddenly aged 55 in 2002, a service by posting extracts of his book on my website. The extracts might persuade you to read the book. Romans had no need of professional physicians, insisted authors like Cato (234–149 BC), for they were hale and hearty, unlike the effete Greeks. ‘Beware of doctors’, he cried; they would bring death by medicine. ‘It is our duty, my young friends’, reflected Cicero (106–43 BC), ‘to resist old age; to compensate for its defects by a watchful care; to fight against it as we would fight against disease; to adopt a regimen of health; to practise…