Galen of Pergamon

Hello! My name is Galen. I was born a very long time ago, in the year 129 CE, in a beautiful city called Pergamon. My father, Nicon, was a brilliant builder, and he taught me to love learning. I was curious about everything, especially animals, plants, and how our bodies worked. I spent my days reading, exploring, and asking lots of questions.

When I was a teenager, my father had a special dream that I should become a doctor. I thought that was a wonderful idea. To be the best doctor I could be, I traveled to faraway cities like Alexandria to learn from the greatest teachers. At that time, we couldn't study people's bodies directly, so I studied animals very carefully instead. By learning how a pig's or a monkey's body worked, I started to understand how our own bodies might work, too.

Around the year 157 CE, I got a very exciting job back in my hometown of Pergamon. I became the doctor for the gladiators. Gladiators were strong athletes who competed in front of big crowds. Sometimes they got hurt during their games, and it was my job to patch them up. Taking care of them taught me so much about muscles, bones, and how to help the body heal. It was like solving a new puzzle every day.

A few years later, around 162 CE, I moved to the biggest city in the world at the time, which was Rome. Soon, the most powerful person there, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, asked me to be his doctor. I wanted to share my knowledge with everyone, so I wrote hundreds of books about everything I had discovered about medicine and the human body. I wanted to make sure that doctors who came after me would have good information to help their patients.

I lived a very long and busy life, for about 87 years. Even after I was gone, doctors kept reading my books for more than a thousand years to learn how to care for people. Today, I am remembered as one of the most important doctors in history. My curiosity helped change medicine and showed everyone how much we can learn when we carefully study the amazing world inside us.