Galen (A.D. 131-201), one of the greatest figures in medicine, was the principal authority in the medical schools of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Galen was so venerated by his contemporaries that many regarded him as a God and even formed a religious cult for his worship.1
His biologic views concerning women were not seriously challenged until the seventeenth century. In the Oeuvres de Galen(Paris, 1854-1856) one reads this about women:
The female is more imperfect than the male. The first reason is that she is colder. if, among animals, the warmer ones are more active, it follows that the colder ones must be more imperfect . . . .
Just as man is the most perfect of all animals, so also, within the human species, man is more perfect than woman. The cause of this superiority is the [male's] superabundance of warmth, heat being the primary instrument of nature . . . .
The male's testicles are all the stronger because he is warmer. The sperm born there, on reaching the final degree of concoction, is the formative principle of the animal. From a single principle wisely imagined by the Creator— that whereby the female is less perfect than the male—follow all the conditions useful for the generation of animal: the impossibility for the female genitalia to emerge externally, the accumulation of a superfluity of useful nourishment, an imperfect sperm, a hollow organ capable of receiving perfect sperm.
In the male, instead, everything is the reverse: an elongated member suitable for copulation and emitting sperm, and an abundance of this same thick warm sperm . . . .
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