Galenic Corpus Research Articles

(C.) PETIT, (S.) SWAIN and (K.-D.) FISCHER (eds) Pseudo-Galenica: The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 2021. Pp. xv + 207. £46.80. 9781908590572.

(C.) PETIT, (S.) SWAIN and (K.-D.) FISCHER (eds) Pseudo-Galenica: The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 2021. Pp. xv + 207. £46.80. 9781908590572.

Sources and Models of the Zoological Excursus in George of Pisidia’s Hexaemeron. Part 1: Aithyia, Ibis, Spider

This article opens a series devoted to investigating the sources of the ample zoological excursus (vv. 916–1223) in the Hexaemeron by George of Pisidia, a 7th-century Byzantine poet. Since the two attempts to find a general formula for George of Pisidia’s treatment of his models have led to directly opposite results (according to Max Wellmann, the poet distanced himself from pagan zoologists; according to Luigi Tartaglia, on the contrary, he drew material from them, favouring Aelian), it seems that the question of the poem’s sources should be addressed by a step-by-step examination of passages, paying attention to such evidence as the coincidence of minor details or words. In v. 1116 the unusual metaphor “aithyia, bending its winged cloud” (in the sense of “spreading its wings”) makes one think of an (unconscious?) association with Arat. Phaen. 918–920, where “a stretching cloud” is mentioned in the catalogue of storm’s signs in immediate juxtaposition to the flapping of the wings of seabirds. In vv. 1117–1124 (the self-cleansing of the ibis) the reference to Galen is not a mere metonymy (= “the most skillful physician”), as interpreters have hitherto thought, but points to the poet’s source: in the Galenic corpus this story is attested three times, and the passage closest to George of Pisidia’s account is [Galen.] Introd. 1.2. In vv. 1154–1159 (the structure of the web) the confused sequence of the stages of the spider’s work (first concentric circles, then radial threads), that contradicts both reality and (which is more important) the ancient tradition going back to Book IX of Historia animalium, seems to betray the influence of John Philoponus (De opif. mundi, p. 257, 24 sqq. Reinhardt). In Philoponus’ text this sequence is justified by the fact that his rhetorical passage describes, strictly speaking, not the web itself, but a drawing of it made by a “diligent geometer”.

Pseudo-Galenica. The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance , by Caroline Petit, Simon Swain, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, eds.

Pseudo-Galenica. The Formation of the Galenic Corpus from Antiquity to the Renaissance , by Caroline Petit, Simon Swain, and Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, eds.

Marinus of Alexandria: Galen's anatomical forefather, or: How do you solve a problem like Marinus?

Marinus of Alexandria is—with the exception of Hippocrates—the most commended ancient anatomist in the Galenic corpus, and the man to whom Galen attributes the resurgence of anatomy itself. Working in the first century C.E., he dramatically influenced the course of the history of medicine in two main ways: firstly, he made great strides in anatomical discovery, expounded in an extensive anatomical textbook that attracted much contemporary praise; secondly, he produced considerable expertise around the ancient world through teaching and didactic enterprise. Marinus generated significant renown and respect from these endeavours, which greatly benefitted future generations of medical scholars, including the infamous Galen himself, who even openly admits as such.However, despite Marinus' enormous influence on Galenic anatomy, a body of scientific knowledge that reigned supreme and untouchable for more than a millennium, he today fails to command a level of recognition befitting his epochal achievements. This article explores the factors contributing to his underrated reputation amidst incredibly mixed scholarly opinion, in contrast to the available evidence of the discoveries and innovations of a man who proved so inspirational to the most famous of ancient authors.

Aitionetprophasischez Hippocrate et Galien : deux mots pour une même cause ?

AbstractThis paper deals with the two notions ofaitionoraitiaandprophasisin the Greek medical texts and asks the question of whether these words are synonymous or not. Therefore, it explores their different meanings in different contexts both in the Hippocratic and in the Galenic corpus. It also investigates how Galen understands these two notions when he reads them in the Hippocratic treatises and how he explains them in his commentaries to Hippocrates, and in particular, if he gives the same meaning to these words in his own treatises or if he uses them in a different way.

Le substrat galénique des idées médicales d’Isaac Beeckman (1616-1627)

The Galenic content of Isaac Beeckman's medical ideas (1617-1629) The Journal tenu par Isaac Beeckman de 1604 a 1634 has been studied in the history of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution following the theme of Isaac Beeckman's physical mathematical mechanistic view, his proto-molecular theory and his atomistic Lucretian influence. This article goes deeper into the medical ideas of the Journal : how Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) settles the structure of living matter according to his intensive reading of Galen. It develops a different analysis from the traditionally triumphalist approach in the history of science, focused on the victory of Cartesian mechanism, particularly in the history of medicine taking up Galenism very briefly because of its obsolete physiology. The Galenic corpus inside Isaac Beeckman's Journal consists of the many commentaries of Galen which Beeckman has put down in writing since 1616 until 1627, after when the passages linked to Galen became fewer. Isaac Beeckman's study of Galenic medicine is analyzed according to three approaches: the teleological dimension of Galenism showing up the organic conception of human body corresponding to the divine Providence and consistent with Beeckman's Calvinist belief, the physiologic angle of Galenism, based on natural faculties, stressing thepurely speculative aspect of Beeckman's commentaries, while the pathologic and therapeutic angle supports the Hippocratic humourism influence.

Islamic Atomism and the Galenic Tradition

The rationalist speculative theologians who were active in the early centuries of Islamic civilization were atomists. Scholars have labored for decades to find the most appropriate sources for the transmission of atomism to Islamicate civilization. The paper argues that the Galenic corpus is likely to be the most promising source: Galen was well-known, if only as the author of despicable, eternalist theories; his On the Elements is a very rich source for the different strands of classical atomism; and Galen's refutation of atomism, which is based on the sensation of pain, fits well with the interest of the Islamic theologians in the physiology of pain.

Véronique Boudon-Millot (ed. and trans.), Galien: Introduction générale; Sur l'ordre de ses propres livres; Sur ses propres livres; Que l'excellent médecin est aussi philosophe, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2007, pp. ccxxxviii, 315, €75.00 (paperback 978-2-251-00536-2).

Véronique Boudon-Millot (ed. and trans.), Galien: Introduction générale; Sur l'ordre de ses propres livres; Sur ses propres livres; Que l'excellent médecin est aussi philosophe, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2007, pp. ccxxxviii, 315, €75.00 (paperback 978-2-251-00536-2). - Volume 52 Issue 1

On the Elements According to Hippocrates (review)

Reviewed by: On the Elements According to Hippocrates Geoffrey Lloyd Galen. On the Elements According to Hippocrates. Edition, translation, and commentary by Phillip De Lacy. Corpus Medicorum Graecorum V 1, 2. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996. 236 pp. DM 220.00. Galen’s short treatise On the Elements According to Hippocrates (De elementis secundum Hippocratem, hereafter El. sec. Hipp.) was among the more influential of his works. In it he sets out the physiological and pathological theories he ascribes to “Hippocrates”—mainly on the basis of an interpretation of the Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man—and since he endorses those theories on his own account, the work can be considered a brief summary of his own views on those questions. It was one of the works used in teaching Galenic medicine in the so-called Alexandrian curriculum, and it became the subject of extensive commentaries, abridgments, and translations into Arabic and Latin. Galen’s analysis of Hippocrates’ views leads him to criticize the element theories of a wide variety of other Greek medical writers and philosophers—ranging from the Presocratics, through Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, to such writers as Asclepiades of Bithynia and the “Pneumatist” physician Athenaeus of Attalia. This treatise is one of our most important sources for the ideas of the last two especially. The treatise was better served by nineteenth-century scholarship than was much of the Galenic corpus collected in the monumental but highly unsatisfactory twenty-volume edition of C. G. Kuhn—at least G. Helmreich produced an edition in 1878. Now Phillip De Lacy, whom scholars have to thank for the magisterial edition of On the Doctrine of Hippocrates and Plato (De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, hereafter PHP), has put us all further in his debt with an exemplary modern edition of El. sec. Hipp. A careful introduction begins by setting out the sources for the text, and not just the Greek manuscript tradition. The important Arabic translation, on which J. S. Wilkie and I reported briefly in an article in Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1982, is here the subject of a more thorough analysis contributed by G. Strohmaier, and R. J. Durling has performed a similarly useful service for the Greco-Latin translation. The text of the treatise itself is provided with a very full apparatus criticus and ample cross-references to other works of Galen or to relevant passages in the Hippocratic Corpus or elsewhere. There is an eminently readable English translation, and there are extensive notes on problems of interpretation. De Lacy argues that, despite the references within the treatise to a “prior” and a “second” logos, the work consists of a single book, not the two into which Helmreich (for instance) divided it. He holds that Ilberg’s view that it was composed around a.d. 169 is reasonable and that, although it has a clearly defined coherence, it may, like PHP, have been subject to a revision of plan, for there are signs of Galen responding to comments and criticisms made by his [End Page 310] colleagues on an earlier version. De Lacy’s careful notes are a mine of information on many doxographic and interpretational problems. His discussions of the tetrapharmakos (of wax, resin, pitch, and tallow) on pp. 182–83, and of Galen’s views on transpiration and respiration, on pp. 194–95, are particularly to be commended. On two points, however, the perfectionist might have sought more. The quality of the notes on points of epistemology and of logic is comparatively thin. Nor does De Lacy do full justice to the major, simple, but embarrassing question of what justification (if any) there was for Galen to find the standard four-element theory based on fire, air, water, and earth in the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man in the first place. He discusses Galen’s rejection of the view that Hippocrates made the primary qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry), as such, the elements—but the rhetorical moves whereby Hippocrates becomes the discoverer of a theory that most would now associate with Empedocles are not exposed. Debate will, no doubt, continue on this and many other tactical and strategic questions that El. sec. Hipp...

A new fragment of Posidonius?

Galen's intellectual autobiography,On my own opinions, has challenged, and frustrated, potential editors for over a century. It is preserved in Greek excerpts, in a Latin translation made from the Arabic and with a spurious conclusion, and, for its last three chapters, in a passage of continuous Greek that circulated under the misleading title ofOn the substance of the natural faculties. Around 1340, the Italian translator Niccolo da Reggio made an extremely faithful Latin version from a Greek manuscript of the last two chapters. Although by itself no one source offers a complete text of the treatise, together they apparently cover it in its entirety. The Latino-arabic version, called variouslyDe sententiis, De sententiis medicorum, andDe credulitate Galeni, is the most extensive, but, as a comparison with the surviving Greek shows, it frequently departs considerably from the wording, and even general meaning, of the Greek. Indeed, without the availability of many parallel passages elsewhere in the Galenic corpus, much of this Latin translation would remain unintelligible.

Galen ad multos annos.

This paper focuses on demonstrating the weakness of the traditional date for Galen's death. It shows that there are good grounds from both within the Galenic Corpus and outside it for thinking that he lived at least until he was eighty. Information from Byzantine and Arab scholars from the sixth century onwards suggests that he had died in the reign of Caracalla, perhaps in 216.