This week I read up on Roman medicine and Roman contributions to medicine. The Romans started learning about medicine from the Greeks and from previous Greek works, and in fact, most “Roman” doctors of medicine were Greek or of Greek origin. Central beliefs they inherited from the Greeks included belief in the 4 basic humors and bloodletting as a way of curing illnesses. The most famous Roman medical practitioner was Galen. He wrote many works on medicine, and his most famous was to become a textbook on medicine for the next thousand years and more in Europe.
Much of his work was translated, expounded upon, ordered, and commentated by Arab and Muslim. They placed great emphasis upon his work and the works we now have in English and other Western languages have been all translated from the Arabic translations of Galen’s work. Some works are still only in Arabic, and only a few remain in their original Latin. A new idea was brought by the Muslim and Arab physicans and philosophers who learned from and expanded Galen’s works-experimientation. Through this, they found new results, some of which confirmed Galen’s ideas and the Greeks, and some which contridicted them, such as Galen’s theory of humorism and Galen’s theory on how the heart worked.
Things to work on this week include learning my hic, haec, hoc down pat 
