For almost fifteen hundred years, Galen of Pergamum(130—ca. 200 A.D.) was the virtually undisputed authority in medical matters. He composed, it is said, nearly five hundred treatises in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and such varied felds as logic, ethics, and grammar, as well as therapeutic and clinical works. His scientific approach to anatomy and his use of inductive reasoning in the diagnosis of disease made him the unquestioned "Prince of Physicians" until the early sixteenth century. The present volume offers for thefirsttime in English translation his two works in thefieldof "moral philosophy," an area that, in the manner in which he approaches them, makes them contributions to that part of medicine known today as psychotherapy.

It was Galen's thesis that passion and moral error were diseases, but diseases of the soul and not the body, and that the physician treating a patient suffering from a "diseased soul" must attack the passion or error directly and immediately—an approach that has had a profound infiuence on the subsequent treatment of mental disorder.