Galen (129-c. 216 C.E.), known to the Arabs as Jālīnūs, was a Greek-speaking physician born in Pergamum. His career, which unfolded essentially in Rome under the reign of emperors Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, and Septimius Severus, occupies a place in the history of Arab medicine comparable to that of Aristotle with respect to philosophy. His vast work (more than 20,000 pages in the standard edition by C. G. Kühn, Leipzig 1821-33) representing one eighth of the totality of preserved Greek literature from Homer to the end