The recent outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa created not only a medical crisis of global dimensions, but a host of complex problems in the communities affected by the epidemic. Soon after doctors and public health organizations had begun to implement strategies for containment of the disease, it became clear that scientific knowledge alone was not going to be sufficient.

The particular biology of this virus and its paths of contagion required that infected corpses be quarantined and buried without any human contact, but these protocols clashed with certain West African burial rituals that involved physical contact with dead bodies. Confronting the disconnect between science and social custom took public health workers far beyond biomedicine and into realms of cultural practice, history, religion, language, and ideology.

As of last week, the Ebola outbreak has been declared officially over: no new cases have arisen in Liberia, Sierra Leone, or Guinea. The end of the epidemic has been credited to the enormous “international collaborative effort,” a collaboration that involved many expertises outside of medical science. Here was a situation where science and technology needed assistance from entirely different kinds of knowledge — knowledge we would call ‘humanistic.’

As academia scrambles to respond to the privileging of science and technology and recent declines in humanities course enrollments, it is worth remembering that the debate about the ‘value of the humanities’ is far from abstract, as the Ebola epidemic — one example among many — shows. Many articles and blogs have appeared in recent years about the ‘humanities in crisis.’ The many eloquent and impassioned arguments in defense of the humanities have become familiar by now, as has the narrative of how we got to this point: the economic crisis of 2008, anxiety about jobs and careers, and a general feeling that one’s course of study should be configured with an eye on employability. The urgency seems recent, though I’m old enough to remember a similar ‘crisis’ in the 1970s, and I’m pretty sure that the seeds were already germinating before that. I leave such cultural history to others who have a fuller historical and sociological understanding of post-WWII academic culture than I do.

One thing for certain, however, is that our current crisis is just one inflection of a broader debate that goes back much further than our new millennium or even the previous century. It was very much on the mind of Galen, for example, the great Greek biomedical scientist and philosopher of the second century CE, who wrote polemically on several occasions with his own take on the appropriate interaction between science and (to use our own term) the humanities in the educational curricula of his day.

I find it instructive for a number of reasons to trace Galen’s thinking on many points of detail in this debate. First, although recognizable as a ‘scientist’ even by the strictest definition we might demand of the word, he would almost certainly have been a great champion of the humanities today. This in itself is somewhat unusual: it is far more common to read defenses of the humanities by humanists themselves rather than by scientists, who have little incentive to jump into this particular fray.

It is also worth considering Galen’s contribution to the science-humanities debate because he offers fresh insight into the larger issues at stake. His perspective — unfraught by our own post-Enlightenment cultural history which has deeply polarized the ‘arts and sciences’ — might help us reflect more clearly on what it means to seek knowledge and to understand ourselves and the world. In Galen, we find a scientist offering strong advocacy for the study of ‘arts and letters’ not only as a kind of supplement to scientific studies, but also as a necessary component of them.

Galen worked in a historical period of Roman political domination, but all serious education in the late Empire had a Classical and Hellenistic Greek curriculum that packaged the wisdom of the Greek arts and sciences under the grand term paideia. Galen was a product of this holistic educational system, which included the study of Greek poetry, history, rhetoric, and philosophy. These areas of study were regarded, at least ideally, as interrelated endeavors. I say ‘ideally’ because — as Galen suggests — there were signs of tension in the air. Increasing scientific specialization led to an emphasis, especially among doctors, on practical, technical, and even business skills at the expense of theoretical and moral training in the non-scientific arts.

Surely this will sound familiar as one of the dilemmas of today’s academic climate: who has time to study history when there’s so much chemistry to learn? How will studying poetry or Sanskrit or Greek or Italian modernism help me cure patients or design a better battery? Galen had various responses to this type of question for his own time. We find them here and there throughout his many works, but he evidently regarded the problem as significant enough to address explicitly in two separate treatises. Both of these offer Galen’s thinking about the best education for doctors, and articulate his belief in a broad, inter- and multi-disciplinary training.

The first gets right to the point with its title, The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher. Galen was moved to write The Best Doctor by his discontent with the medical culture of his day. He specifically identifies three interrelated problems: (1) “doctors pay lip-service to Hippocrates,” but are too lazy to actually reach his level of expertise, (2) because they don’t follow Hippocrates properly, they lack training in logical theory, and (3) what he calls the “bad upbringing current in our times,” which encourages people to value wealth over virtue. For, as he asserts, “it is impossible to pursue financial gain at the same time as training oneself in so great an art [as medicine]; someone who is really enthusiastic about one of these aims will inevitably despise the other.” (57K; all translations are from P.N. Singer).

The general lines of this argument are conservative and predictable: the current generation no longer engages adequately with the greats of the past, no one wants to work as hard as people in the good old days, the focus is now only on money, and so on. We hear the same ideas in our own time, and especially in discussions of waning interest in the humanities. Galen’s complaint rests on his belief that one can only be a good doctor if one has had a broad rigorous education that molds not only the intellect but also one’s character. What is distinct and interesting about Galen’s position in this work, I think, is how easily he interweaves the scientific with the ethical. He lists very concretely how the study of philosophy will make one a better scientist and medical practitioner:

…[it] provides the foundations for knowledge of the body’s very nature, which is to be understood on three levels. First, the level of the primary elements [i.e., the hot, cold, wet, dry], which are in a state of total mixture with each other; secondly, the level of the perceptible, which is also called the ‘homogeneous’ [e.g., blood, flesh, bone]; thirdly, that which derives from the organs. The use and function for the animal of each of these is also a lesson of the logical method: they too should be learned by a process of rigorous demonstration, not uncritically… (60K)

Science and medicine, however, as Galen realizes, are practiced in the context of human desires and needs, and so always within some sort of moral context, as he makes clear in summing up:

[The doctor] must be practiced in logical theory in order to discover the nature of the body, the differences between diseases, and the indications as to treatment; he must despise money and cultivate self-control in order to stay the course. He must, therefore, know all the parts of philosophy: the logical, the physical, and the ethical: In that case there will be no danger of his performing any evil action since he practices self-control and despises money: all evil actions that men undertake are done either at the prompting of greed or under the spell of pleasure. And so he is bound to be in the possession of the other virtues too, for they all go together. It is impossible to gain one without acquiring all the others as an immediate consequence; they are connected as if by one string (60–61K).

As these passages show, the Greek term ‘philosophy’ includes a broader array of pursuits than our own ‘philosophy’ — we, for example, tend to separate off the study of the physical world from the ethical and metaphysical. We also take for granted the idea that good science implies logical thinking, but Galen calls for a more focused and theoretical training in logic than scientists today tend to get. The doctor who understands logical theory, Galen holds, will better understand the physical world (biology, physiology, environment), and will more likely know how to act virtuously. And by the way — he continues — don’t let anyone try to tell you that a doctor can be ethical without being a philosopher: one needs to study ethics first, he claims, before one can actually be virtuous:

I hope that no one is going to quibble over words and come out with some nonsense… [saying] for example that the doctor should of course be above monetary matters and be a just man, but still not a philosopher.

Philosophy is only one branch of what we call the humanities today, and many philosophers now are even moving away from traditional humanistic questions and closer to the sciences; such philosophers would certainly approve of Galen’s obsession with logic and syllogistic precision, but probably contest his insistence that logic and ethics are necessarily intertwined with one another.

In another treatise, Galen urges doctors to study all the ‘arts.’ This work, called An Exhortation to Study the Arts, is a fascinating document from an era when the borders between intellectual disciplines were more permeable than they are today. At the same time, it’s clear from this work that there were plenty of doctors in the second century CE who were content to work in a kind of specialist’s isolation that Galen disapproved of.

What I love about this treatise is that Galen isn’t embarrassed, as we often are, to begin with fundamental questions about what it means to be a human being as opposed to any other creature. The very first sentence of the work begins with musings about a problem we still haven’t really resolved: “It is not clear whether so-called ‘dumb animals’ are, in fact, entirely devoid of reason.” He is willing to allow that animals have something resembling reason even if they don’t have the capacity for verbal expression; but curiously, he is less interested in language as a boundary marker between human and animal, and more impressed by the human capacity for performing and learning a variety of arts:

The crucial difference between animals and man, though, is seen in the great variety of arts which this latter animal performs, and from the fact that man alone has the capacity for knowledge: he can learn whichever art he wishes. (2K)

The Greek word for ‘art’ here is technê, from which we get our words ‘technical’ and ‘technology’. For a Greek of this period, the term had a wider scope than it does for us: it included not only crafts and certain physical skills, but also (and more of interest to Galen), all the intellectual practices and skills that benefit humanity. Galen refers to these as the “divine arts,” which he valued more highly than more artisanal arts. He includes among the divine arts geometry, astronomy, natural science, and of course medicine, but also poetry, music, and (at the top of his hierarchy) philosophy (‘the greatest of divine goods’). All of these are united as arts, according to Galen, by the fact that they are “useful to life” (biôphilês), and he distinguishes these true arts from those “useless or wicked” practices which are sometimes called arts (“acrobatic activities, such as tightrope walking, or spinning in a circle without becoming dizzy”).

Using grand metaphors and imagery, he continues by dividing humans into two conceptual groups with different patron saints — those who follow the goddess Chance (sometimes translated as Fortune) and those who follow Hermes, a god whom Galen refers to as “the lord of the Word (logos) and practitioner of all Art.” The followers of Chance live random, unpredictable lives, largely devoid of reason, while the followers of Hermes are devoted to the literary and scientific arts, especially the ‘high’ and rational arts, as Galen calls them in order to distinguish them from the less desirable workmanlike arts, which exercise the body rather than the mind.

The moralizing throughout is rather predictable and heavy-handed, but certainly vivid — the followers of Chance turn out to be mostly wealthy people obsessed with money, or obsessed with family pedigree. Galen describes the followers of Chance as consisting of “demagogues aplenty, courtesans and catamites and betrayers of friends; and there are also murderers, grave breakers and robbers; quite a few of them have not spared even the gods, but have pillaged their altars too.” In other words, these people who throw themselves to the whims of Chance had no moral foundation, because they had not exercised the intellect or reason, and had no interest in knowledge or cultivating any of the pursuits that distinguish us from animals, who live similar lives of randomness.

But it is his particular description of the followers of Hermes that is most interesting for our own inquiry into the nature and relevance of the arts to human life. Galen offers a graphic, idiosyncratic imagining of these followers of Hermes. He imagines them gathering around the god…

…and nearest the god, forming a circle about him, are geometers, mathematicians, philosophers, doctors, astronomers, and scholars. After them the second band: painters, sculptors, grammarians, carpenters, architects; and after them the third order: all the other arts. Each is drawn up in his individual place; but they all fix the god with the same constant look, obedient to his bidding…You will find here, too, many who stand actually with the god — a sort of fourth rank, picked out from the others…The contemplation of this band and of its character will, I fancy, conduce to emulation and, indeed, adoration. Socrates is among them, and Homer, Hippocrates, and Plato, as well as their lovers; these are people to be revered like gods, as they are the god’s deputies and attendants. (7–8K)

For Galen, in other words, there are no ‘Arts and Sciences’ — in two large and separate categories as we have come to conceptualize them — just the ‘Arts’ (technai), sets of practices that can be taught and learned systematically and benefit humankind. He recognizes a hierarchy of the arts, to be sure, as his image of the circular bands around Hermes suggests. But this is not a hierarchy based on a notional divide between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’: mathematics and astronomy are indeed in the first band closest to the god, and painting and sculpture come in the second tier. But we should note as well that included in the inner sanctum, in that separate fourth rank of very special people who are closest to Hermes and themselves godlike, we find none other than the poet Homer, whose technê produced epic fictions of heroes, mythology, magic, and fantasy.

Galen didn’t believe that poetry and science were ‘doing’ the same thing (and in other works he often makes it clear that poetry can be scientifically illustrative, but is not itself science). But for him they were both connected at the highest level because they were both essential for the improvement of the human condition. Poetry was essential because it was exemplary: people learn from poetry morally, aesthetically, and philosophically because it represents facets of the world humans inhabit — a world of relationships and emotions, as well as material things. Proper, precise scientific inquiry was also ‘useful for life’ (as Galen would say), but in his mind it could not be accomplished by scientists who were not properly trained in the other arts, including the literary, because they would not then have the character suited to do science properly.

This attitude accounts for Galen’s constant disdain for venal doctors who are only in it for the money, or obsessed with vanity or pleasure-seeking. Such behavior is not only unbecoming of a good citizen, but it distracts a person from doing good science because it taints one’s motivations for empirical, objective research in the first place. We hear similar arguments today from bioethicists, concerned that doctors with no background in philosophical — indeed, humanistic — thinking are often ill-equipped to make sound judgments about the very difficult ethical dilemmas that continually arise in medicine.

I wouldn’t want to pretend that reading Galen is going to solve our own problems. But it might be useful for us to approach our curricular dilemmas with a modestly Galenic perspective. The key, I think, lies in his characterization of the god Hermes as the ‘Lord of the Logos, and practitioner of every Art’. The Greek word logos is one of those loaded words with multiple meanings — word, logic, reason — but his point here is that the pursuit of knowledge in any realm requires calculation and communication (both concepts conveyed by the Greek logos), precision and clarity — again, all concepts inherent in logos. These are all concepts we easily associate with science, but in fact they apply to the study of humanities as well — the historian’s desire for accuracy is no different from the physicist’s, even though they may each have to settle for different levels of it.

Finally, while Galen’s simplistic moralizing may seem a bit quaint to us in the context of our more complex societies, we still believe on some level that our academic curricula are directed toward the formation of character (whatever we mean by that exactly). It may embarrass us to speak in these terms, but perhaps we should take note of how Galen, in an era when it also seemed as if the arts and sciences were beginning to drift apart, makes an actual argument for the importance of integrating all areas of knowledge within a holistically conceived curriculum.

Galen wanted scientists to be specialists who were not only technically competent, but also humane and morally responsible. It may seem a bit of a parlor game to imagine how Galen might have responded to the challenges of the Ebola epidemic if he were to find himself among the doctors treating patients and managing the disposal of infected corpses in West Africa, but we can be sure he would at least try to emulate the followers of Hermes, applying all of his vast knowledge, not just his medical expertise, to this complex human problem.

Ralph Rosen is Vartan Gregorian Professor of Humanities and Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests, teaching and publications focus on Greco-Roman medicine, ancient comedy and satire, ancient aesthetics and and comparative poetics.

A version of this essay was originally presented in the Kemp Lecture series at the University of Missouri, April 2015.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.