The Prince of medicine, by Susan P. Mattern – review

In the first draft of the screenplay for the film Gladiator, the character to be played by Russell Crowe (‘father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife’, etc) was named not Maximus, but Narcissus. Which might have made for a slightly different movie. One can imagine the emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) telling the beefy hero, ‘I’m entrusting the empire to you, Narcissus, because you’re loved by the soldiers, more gifted than my son Commodus, and also because you take better care of your skin than any general I’ve ever known.’

The reason for the original choice of praenomen was that the character was loosely based on a real-life athlete named Narcissus, believed to have killed Commodus in 192 AD. The emphasis here is on ‘loosely’. The historical veracity of the film is practically nil, which doesn’t make much difference unless you happen to be a historian of the period, like Susan P. Mattern. A professor at the University of Georgia, she has written a competent, confident and frequently fascinating biography of Galen, who served as physician to both Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and also worked for years patching up gladiators in Pergamon, the town in modern-day Turkey from which he hailed. And she does so without once mentioning Russell Crowe. Now that takes temperance.

She manages it partly because she occupies a higher intellectual plane than some of us (the name Galen, in case you’re wondering, is pronounced to rhyme with Van Halen) and partly because she has enough of interest to say without down-shifting into small talk.

A medical equivalent of Christ or Socrates, her ‘Prince of Medicine’ had a knack for making his rivals look stupid. Sometimes he staged demonstrations for the purpose, public vivisections that astonished the multitude; sometimes, it just happened.