Antoine Boutros - With this exciting headline we conclude our historical quest for the location of intelligence within the human body. This topic captured the imagination and the interest of the pioneers of science and medicine for a long period, which extended from the days of Pythagoras in the 5th century BC to the age of Galen in the 1st century AD. Basically, this quest resulted in the amalgamation of medicine with religion and philosophy. The result was a series of developments - strange as they were - that gave a new momentum to science and medicine in an epoch witnessed by great leaps of the primeval medical mind.

Galen was a brilliant surgeon who left behind no less than 22,000 pages of text and annotations. He could have been accredited well before the English physician William Harvey, for his major contributions regarding the blood circulatory system, had he not adhered to the false concepts of his age because of their dominance. 

Galen joined a circle of philosophers and scientists who were able to uncover some scientific mysteries hidden within nature and discover things that seemed, even later on, to have no direct connection with scientific and medical developments, but nevertheless turned out to be medical milestones.

From the variations of sound emerging from the blacksmith’s hammer forging metals (due to differences in the weight of hammers and because the length of the string assigns the tone), the secrets of music and variations in tunes and their relationship with numbers were established.   They also unraveled the mysteries of numbers and assigned traits to them, giving them moral influences and the power to control humans, gods and even demons. Although the Semiotics failed in their quest to change cheap minerals into gold, they greatly contributed to the science of chemistry, astronomy and medicine.  Theophyl Al Rahawi, the head of Khalifa Mahdi’s astrologers, translated Galen’s books on anatomy and surgery into Arabic.

The human soul was divided into three parts: the Nutritive, the Perceptive and the Rational. The Nutritive is responsible for nourishment, growth and reproduction, the Perceptive lies behind feeling, imagination and movement  while the Rational is specific to humans and characterized by the ability to use reason. This categorization, adopted by Aristotle, considered that reasonable perception resides in the heart. Everything seemed logical except the idea that the heart, and not the brain, was the center of reason and intelligence. Thus, true science had to wait for a single major leap to discover the real importance of the brain since traditional belief that of Aristotle, was that the brain was nothing more than a cooling gland of the body.

Galen filled the gap and made the leap. He assigned the three souls three specific locations in the human body: the liver, the heart and the brain. The Nutritive Soul moved the bad blood formed in the liver, a notion accepted for many centuries until recently. Meanwhile the Perceptive Soul was located in the heart where bad blood was mixed with pure blood and from it the soul entered the veins. As for the Rational Soul, Galen placed it in the brain. As such, he consolidated the opinion that the brain was the center of reason and therefore of intelligence. 

The Arabs were introduced to Galen or Galenus as they called him, through the School of Alexandria.  Haneen bin Isaac, one of the most famous Christian translators of the Abbasid era translated all of his writings into Syriac and Arabic. The Greek originals of seven of Galen’s books on the science of autopsy were lost and only the Arabic translations remain. Ibn al-Nadim, the first bibliographer in history and the author of the famous “Al-Fihrist” (the Index), listed 57 books by Galen that were translated into Arabic and the names of their translators. Modern theologian and historian Jesuit Louis Sheikho documented, in his book “Christian Scholars in Islam”, the efforts of doctors, scientists and translators in spreading Galen’s thoughts. Thus, Galen became so famous that the Arabs referred to him as the “prince of medicine of his time”. His book “Al Diriaq”(meaning the Antidote), ornamented with fascinating illustrations known in the industry and design of scientific books at the peak of Arab civilization, is proof of his service to medicine and the respect awarded to him through the ages.

Galen continued to reign over his field from the 1st century until the 9th century AD. Medicine was then taken over by Arab scientists such as Al-Razi (9th century AD), one of the greatest of his time in clinical medicine, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), known as the Principal Sheikh (10th century AD), and with them a new golden age of medicine began.

However, the science related to the brain remains unsettled and the story does not end with Galen. The debate over the brain, as the pride of humans, is still unabated up to this age and will continue to be so until science unlocks all the mysteries of the brain. 

 

 

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