William O. Stephens

He might've been, you know, 10 or 12 or 14, but he wasn't any older than that, right?

So historians aren't exactly sure when.

And in the Roman world that he inhabited, you know, death came easy.

You know, they did not have medicine.

They had plagues.

They had plenty of quacks that, you know, practiced anything but what we would call medicine.

And sometimes patients would recover despite it.

And they did learn things from the Greek physicians, but it was really Galen who made the major strides.

And Marcus was very fortunate to have someone like Galen, who was quite a coward, apparently, when it came to facing the plague.

but was a brilliant philosopher and scientist with his anatomical dissections and what he learned about the human body.

And so that came later, you know, Galen entered Marcus's life when he was an adult.

But I mean, that only takes you so far.

I think, you know, a lot of it is just going to be, is just going to be luck, you know, or, or genetics or something.

Right.

He, for whatever reason, he,

He was a very serious young boy and he took philosophy.

He really was drawn to reflection.

He was a meditative sort of guy.

Right.

From an early age.