Luis García-Ballester, Galen and Galenism: theory and medical practice from Antiquity to the European Renaissance, ed. Jon Arrizabalaga, Montserrat Cabré, Lluís Cifuentes and Fernando Salmón, Variorum Collected Studies series Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003, pp. xii, 332, £57.50 (hardback 0-86078-846-6).

Abstract

This is the second volume of collected essays by Luis Garcia-Ballester, the renowned Spanish scholar in the field of the history of medicine who died towards the end of 2000. In some ways, however, it looks backwards from the first (Medicine in a multicultural society: Christian, Jewish and Muslim practitioners in the Spanish kingdoms, 1222–1610, also published by Ashgate), opening as it does with four articles on the classical roots of the medieval medical world that was more particularly his domain. It is the figure of Galen, the most influential of ancient medical thinkers and writers, who is the focus of this quartet. A new English version of a synthetic essay on Galen's life and work, originally produced by Garcia-Ballester to introduce a Spanish translation of Galen's major treatise On the affected parts (De locis affectis), joins such well-established essays as that ‘On the origin of the “six non-natural things” in Galen’. Then matters move on from Galen himself, to the medical system built out of his ideas and writings in the medieval West; and seven essays are dedicated to tracing and analysing these developments. Indeed, it is in many ways changes within these intellectual currents, and their institutional setting and professional involvements, that are of particular interest, as articles on ‘The new Galen’, and ‘The construction of a new form of learning and practising medicine in medieval Latin Europe’ indicate. Away from these pretty well-known and influential discussions, there are two essays (in Spanish) on medieval debates on fevers, and other pieces on medical teaching and the circulation of Arabic medical manuscripts in Spain, the former rendered into English for the first time. The book is completed by a full (and very impressive) bibliography of Garcia-Ballester's publications, and a welcome index of persons, texts, places and institutions. There are, it has to be said, some problems with the English, the typography, and the general presentation of the volume; but such a collection is valuable none the less. It brings together in a thematic manner essays by a prominent scholar from a wide range of sources, some more accessible than others.