The doctor who ruled medicine for 1,300 years was alive in Rav's youth

Galen — court physician to the Roman emperor, and the doctor whose writings would dominate European and Islamic medicine for over a thousand years — was still alive while Rav (Abba Arikha), founder of the great academy at Sura, was a young man. The father of Babylonian Talmud study and antiquity's most influential physician overlapped by about four decades.

One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.