Afternoons with Galen

The narrator is a health journalist who is fed up with health. In the wake of a medical scandal she is commissioned to contribute an historical perspective to a popularised book on anatomy. While researching she makes the acquaintance of two people: the 2nd century Greek physician Galen, and an academic with a compulsion to study him. Together, she and the academic plot to turn her health column over to Galen. The readers are delighted with ancient advice – it suits them better than the clinically impersonal – and the magazine’s editor is persuaded to introduce a new columnist – Asclepius, the pagan healing god who prescribes through dreams. ‘Ask Asclepius’ takes off, but not everyone is convinced. The health writer is sued by a pharmaceutical company for writing a damaging news story about one of its drugs. Will modern medicine win out to ancient wisdom?