I thought this book deserved a fuller review. Galen accounts for 10% of all ancient Greek literature prior to 350 AD (page 1) so he is a major author.
It is a collection of 14 articles on Galen. From a purely historical perspective I found the first article 'The Man and His Work' on Galen's career to be the most interesting. It is informative and relatively brief at 33 pages. It reconstucts Galen's career from the scattered references in his extensive works. Galen loved to polemicise against the ignorance and incompetence of his contemporaries and succeeded in asigning most of their works to oblivion as his writings came to dominate medicine.
The other interesting article is number 14 on 'The Fortunes of Galen' looking at the fate of his writings and his medical theories (called Galenism). The discovery that blood circulated around the body and the advent of human dissection served to prove the faults in Galen's theories so he faded from relevance after the 18th century. With no interest from doctors or Classicists Galen only received sporadic articles until relatively recently. A quick look at the bibliography shows an increasing number of English translations over the last two decades.
While a lot of Galen survives in Greek there are many Arabic translations that are only now being investigated. I was surprised to learn that Galen wrote a fair number of philosophical treatise that don't survive in Greek (the Byzantines were only interested in him as a doctor) but in Arabic.
There are lots of articles on various medical theories of Galen like anatomy, physiology, therapeutics and pharmacology that might be interesting to historians of medicine but I found them a bit tedious. This is the best (and only) introduction to Galen. Well worth a read!
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