Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood Read Online Free Page A

by diseases.” That bleeding hemorrhoids are to be appreciated and even encouraged, I daresay, surprises most of the assembled sufferers.
    His provocative comments did not go unanswered. The Erasistrateans shot back rebuttals and insults, and, outside the hall, rivals spread malicious gossip. In time, Galen began to fear he’d be poisoned by his enemies. For his own safety, after barely a year in Rome, he stopped publicly antagonizing opponents. Galen turned to writing, producing books in which he both challenged the conclusions of the rival sects and put forth his own findings. He began to tutor privately, and his medical practice flourished. Among his patients were members of the royal court, including a son-in-law of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In less than four years after his arrival in the city, Galen was consulting with the emperor himself. When Marcus Aurelius’s small son fell ill, Galen cured him, earning not only the father’s complete trust but also the title of Emperor’s Personal Physician. Chief among his duties: concocting antidotes for poisons that might be used to assassinate the ruler. Galen made himself an expert at creating a wide range of treatments from herbal extracts. These came to be called
galenicals,
a term still used for medications made purely from botanical ingredients.
    The same son whose life Galen had saved, Commodus, abruptly fired the doctor upon succeeding his father as emperor at age nineteen. Commodus (portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in the 2000 film
Gladiator
) was a brutal, decadent tyrant responsible, historians agree, for leading the Roman Empire into steady decline. Galen remained in Rome but kept a low profile, quietly continuing his scientific work and his ceaseless writing. He wrote eighteen books on the subject of the pulse alone, as well as tomes on fever, anatomy, the nervous system, nutrition, and philosophy. Most of his original manuscripts were stored for safekeeping at a temple guarded by priests. Unfortunately, in the same year as Commodus’s assassination, A.D. 192, a fire destroyed the temple and half of Galen’s life’s work. About 120 books survived.
    With Commodus gone, the doctor, now in his midsixties, slowly reemerged and again began making house calls to the royal palace. Instead of resuming his former duties, however, Galen realized that the new emperor and his wife had other ideas. The queen, aware of his genius for creating botanical remedies, commanded that he concoct equally miraculous beauty potions. Though the assignment was beneath him, Galen must’ve felt he had no choice. He whipped up extractions to turn black hair golden, face paints for eye shadow and rouge, perfumes and pomades. He was the Max Factor of his day, minus the screen credits or royalties. But he made the best of it, funneling what he learned about cosmetics into further research in pharmacology and, of course, into new books.
     
    By the time of his death at age seventy, no aspect of the human body had escaped Galen’s scrutiny. No organ remained unidentified. No ailment could not be cured by his means. He left behind detailed opinions and instructions on everything from venesection in children to mixing up the perfect eyeliner. He did such a thorough job that, in the fourteen centuries following his passing, few dared challenge Galenism, as his teachings came to be known. His reach even extended to the Eastern world, where his books were translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Whereas Asclepius was the mythical god of medicine, Galen was close to the real thing. Indeed, in the early Middle Ages, church leaders declared his work to have been divinely inspired and thus infallible, dubbing him Galen the Divine. To oppose him was blasphemous, punishable with death—burning at the stake. All of which now seems ironic because Galen had never been a religious man and had, in fact, championed the value of scientific experimentation.
    Still, the question remains, why did Galen hold sway