How To Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness

By Galen

Selected & translated by Katherine D. Van Schaik

Princeton University Press 2024

How to Be Healthy: An Ancient Guide to Wellness, the latest in the delightful “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series from Princeton University Press, starts with a quasi-legal disclaimer that’s too good not to quote in full. “The health advice contained in this book is intended for historical illumination, and while it may be timely and timeless, it is nonetheless ancient,” it goes. “Please consult your physician before making any drastic changes to your diet and exercise routine, or otherwise attempting to alter your humoral balance.” 

Since there’s no such thing as a “humoral balance,” you can hope that at least part of this disclaimer is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, although you’d be hoping in vain. Probably half of Princeton University’s own 8000 current undergraduates not only believe completely in crackpot garbage like the four humors of the human body, or the flat earth, or astrology, or malevolent spirits, but would also downvote, sue, and physically assault any teacher who tried to correct them on any of it. So the disclaimer is well-taken: no matter how utterly ridiculous it would be to turn a sweaty, panicked face to an EMT and croak out, “But Galen says …”, who knows how many of those undergraduates routinely end up in the ER because they tried to fix a ruptured appendix by scrying with chicken bones? 

But as it is, Princeton University Press is off the hook, and translator Katherine Van Schaik is free to make what she can of Galen’s corpus of work, including his treatise on “avoiding stress,” which was only discovered in 2005. Van Schaik’s brief biography on the book’s dust jacket – completing an PhD in classical history at Harvard while simultaneously an MD from Harvard Medical School – makes her sound like a bewilderingly capable over-achiever, making her a fitting literary companion for an amazing polymath like Galen, who’s best known for being the personal physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Van Schaik picks through Galen’s work, sifting for personality, good turns of phrase, and general health-insights that don’t too blatantly conflict with modern medical knowledge and practice. 

Although not all readers will consider it so, this is an advantage that “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” has over a series like the Loeb Classical Library from Harvard: a smart editor can shape the material with a strong editing hand (often while also providing interesting new translations, as in this case) to some polemical end. Happily, the main polemical end in this case is shared between editor and edited: both are concerned with health. “We humans,” Galen writes, “desire health for the activities of life, which sicknesses interfere with, or interrupt and stop entirely.” Also, health frees people from the disturbance of pain. So far, we can all agree.

It’s in going beyond such basics that the book runs into trouble, since Galen lived in barbaric pre-science times and is absolutely no use in anything beyond the basics. “We know more than we ever have about human health and disease in the past,” Van Schaik diplomatically allows, “but this does not obviate an approach to ancient medical texts that recognizes that they describe a world different from our own.” Mostly this translates to studying Galen as a doctor but ignoring his actual doctoring, except when he recommends the rock-bottom basics like moderation in all things – including exercise, and even there Galen has Bronze Age reservations that inevitably haul in the Spartans:

You will perhaps think that I am praising running, and as many other exercises as thin the body. Not so: I object to imbalance everywhere and claim that every art needs to train good balance, and that if something lacks balance, it is not fine. Hence, I do not praise running since it has a tendency to thin the condition of the body and provides no training for courage. Victory does not belong to those who flee swiftly, but to those who are able to prevail in hand-to-hand combat, and it was not because they were able to run very fast that the Spartans were able to accomplish so much, but because they were courageous in standing firm.

Thanks to Van Schaik’s judicious pruning of the material here, Galen emerges as a lively, opinionated writer, fond of literary and historical allusions. It’s easy to imagine, from this portrait, that he might have been an authoritative, electrifying presence in person. The reader pictures him giving unvarnished medical advice to the broad-minded emperor and his infamously moody son. He also gave them something called theriac, which Van Schaik describes as “a complicated mixture of spices and animal products (including, by Galen’s time, viper’s flesh) that was initially developed by the kings of Pontus in the second century BCE,” going on to say it was “intended as a prophylactic and antidote for poisons, as well as a general therapeutic.” Van Schaik mentions that Marcus Aurelius took the mixture every day, “necessitating its secure and reliable production.” If “secure and reliable production” sounds a bit more urgent than, say, a penchant for prune juice, it might be helpful to consider the ingredient Van Schaik omits, which was opium in steadily ramping amounts. 

How to Be Healthy is at its strongest when it’s considering that newly-discovered document about stress, but it’s mighty strong everywhere else too, thanks to the careful vetting one impressive polymath gives another. Most of Galen is primitive, superstitious nonsense, fit only for historical study (and the various university courses currently being offered in Harry Potter-style spell-casting), but Katherine Van Schaik here presents everything of his that could ever be included in a book with this title. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News