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Galen of Pergamon, physician to Roman emperors and gladiators, wrote On the Natural Faculties in the second century AD as a systematic defense of the view that living bodies are governed by purposive natural powers — of attraction, retention, alteration, and expulsion. Arguing against the atomists and mechanists, he grounds physiology in the idea that Nature works toward ends, a teleological biology that dominated European and Islamic medicine for some fourteen centuries. Arthur John Brock's 1916 translation preserves the polemical vigor of a foundational text of the Western medical tradition.

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