tations.
Sometimes several doctors would hold a consultation, and, apparently
forgetting the patient for the time, would hold violent disputations.
Their main object was to display their dialectical skill, and their
arguments sometimes led to blows. These discreditable exhibitions were
rather frequent in Rome in his time.

With Galen, as with Hippocrates, it is sometimes impossible to tell what
works are genuine, and what are spurious. He seemed to think that he was
the successor of Hippocrates, and wrote: "No one before me has given the
true method of treating disease: Hippocrates, I confess, has heretofore
shown the path, but as he was the first to enter it, he was not able to
go as far as he wished.... He has not made all the necessary
distinctions, and is often obscure, as is usually the case with ancients
when they attempt to be concise. He says very little of complicated
diseases; in a word, he has only sketched what another was to complete;
he has opened the path, but has left it for a successor to enlarge and
make it plain." Galen strictly followed Hippocrates in the latter's
humoral theory of pathology, and also in therapeutics to a great extent.

It is a speculation of much interest how it was that Galen's views on
Medicine received universal acceptance, and made him the dictator in
this realm of knowledge for ages after his death. He was not precisely a
genius, though a very remarkable man, and he established no sect of his
own. The reason of his power lay in the fact that his writings supplied
an encyclopaedic knowledge of the medical art down to his own time, with
commentaries and additions of his own, written with great assurance and
conveying an impression of finality, for he asserted that he had
finished what Hippocrates had begun. The world was tired of political
and philosophical strife, and waiting for authority. The wars of Rome
had resulted in placing political power in the hands of one man, the
Emperor; the disputations and bickerings of philosophers and physicians
produced a similar result, and Galen, in the medical world was invested
with the purple.

The effect, therefore, of Galen's writings was, at first, to add to and
consolidate medical knowledge, but his influence soon became an obstacle
to progress. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Galenism
held almost undisputed sway.

The house of Galen stood opposite the Temple of Romulus in the Roman
Forum. This temple, in A.D. 530,