Nicon closely supervised Galen's education and tutored him at home, intending his son to study philosophy or politics.
However, according to Galen, Nicon was visited in a dream by Asclepius, Greek god of healing, who told him to allow his son to study medicine.
In his book, On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, Galen says that his "father's training lay chiefly in the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, architecture, and astronomy".
My mother, however, was so very prone to anger that sometimes she bit her handmaids; she constantly shrieked at my father and fought with him — more than Xanthippe did with Socrates.
Just as in these respects I saw the utter difference between my parents, so also did I see it in the fact that my father (seemed) never to be grieved over any loss, whereas my mother was vexed over the smallest things.