Ethics and medicine in Galen's work

Abstract

In this study, I propose that Galenic ethics need to be understood within the context of medical doctrine. Recently, published work on the relations among Galen's self-fashioning programme, medical methodology and championing of Hippocrates has supported this hypothesis. I emphasize the idea that medical doctrine was an explanation of the concept of a good human life, a tool to be used in furthering the fulfilment of this objective and indeed one of the purposes of medicine. The basis of my argument is that practical philosophy was devised through a biological approach that attested to the existence of an organic purpose for those activities with a moral meaning (corporal desires, emotions, passions). This idea legitimizes the intervention of medicine in the realm of human behaviour. If emotions and desires have a physiological role it is surely the concern of medicine to explain them, and it will also, following the theoretical procedures established for dealing with any malfunction, effect a diagnosis and suggest treatment if either or both are unsound. Furthermore, one of the traditional ideas of disease, the imbalance between parts, explains immoral conduct without recourse to reason. In this way reason becomes a sure guide in the formation of character. According to this view, Galen, and by extension medicine, exert an authority within the debate over the causes of the frequent crises in the Roman world, well over and above (in Galen's own words) that offered by philosophy. When Galen proposed an interpretation of existential distress, anxiety and the persistence of evil as imbalances among organic parts, he was alluding to the breaking-up of the structural organization of the body and suggested that the contemporary milieu, which he considered reprehensible, could be attributed by analogy to the disorder in the structure of Roman society.