 Although his surviving works amount to some 3 million words, this is thought to represent less than a third of his complete writings.In AD 191, a fire in the Temple of Peace destroyed many of his works, in particular treatises on philosophy.Because Galen's works were not translated into Latin in the ancient period, and because of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the study of Galen, along with the Greek medical tradition as a whole, went into decline in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages, when very few Latin scholars could read Greek.