Galen's Writings Research Articles

Гален как представитель греческой paideia эпохи Второй софистики

Thanks to the extensive corpus of Galen's writings, which includes numerous autobiographical works and individual notes, we possess a wealth of information regarding his upbringing and education. According to a fami-ly tradition, he received a classical Greek education (known as paideia), which allowed him to transition from a provincial intellectual to one of the influential figures in Roman society and achieve the status of a court physi-cian. His brilliant command of language, extensive erudition, and active participation in the intellectual life of the Roman elite justify considering Galen as one of the authors of the so-called "Second Sophistic." This article scrutinizes Galen's various accounts of his mentors, early education, and scholastic experiences, with their veracity corroborated by contemporaneous testimonials. In addition to reading and scrutinizing the classical texts that formed the cornerstone of Greek paideia, Galen's education placed great emphasis on the study of exact sciences such as Euclidean geometry and arithmetic, which, together with Aristotle's logic, enabled Galen to adhere to the evidence-based method in medicine. An analysis of Galen's citation fre-quency of classical authors revealed that his foundational education was similar to other authors of his time, whereas the citation of medical authors is unparalleled in ancient literature. Unfortunately, we can only form a vague notion of his library since much of it was lost in a fire during Galen's lifetime in 192 AD. However, his collection of texts is a mix of various knowledge, rare writings, and quotes. Galen's interest in language and words, which confirmed his status as an intellectual, suggests his association with the "Second Sophistic" group. He wrote several works on ancient grammar, word usage, and rhetoric, criticiz-ing both extreme linguistic purism and loose interpretations of old-fashioned Attic language. This paints Galen not just as a doctor but also as a knowledgeable figure of his time.

The Latin Editions of Galen's Opera omnia (1490–1625) and Their Prefaces

AbstractBetween 1490 to 1625, twenty-two editions of Galen's opera omnia were published in Latin, while only two in Greek. In the Western world Galen's literary production was mostly known through Latin translations, even in the sixteenth century, when Greek medicine was being rediscovered in its original language. The paper discusses the twenty-two Latin editions of Galen's writings and how they evolved. In these editions the number of works increased, especially from 1490 to 1533, while later, from 1576–1577 to 1586, forged commentaries on Hippocrates were added, when Galenic medicine was declining. Moreover, in 1490 Galen's works were printed in medieval translations from Arabic and Greek, while by 1541–1542 most of them had already received new humanist translations. The humanist translations, which started about 1480, depended on Greek manuscripts until 1525, when the Aldine provided the standard Greek text of Galen. Afterwards, the Greek manuscripts were used to correct the Latin, especially in the editions from 1541–1542 to 1565. Therefore the complete Latin editions included most of the philological work on Galen during the sixteenth century, as well as discussions on the authorship of some works, on the order in which they had to be read or printed, and on their selection for medical education.

Eve Keller, Generating bodies and gendered selves: the rhetoric of reproduction in early modern England, In Vivo: The Cultural Mediations of Biomedical Science, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 2007, pp. xi, 248, £17.99, $30.00 (paperback 978-0-295-98641-8).

The western, liberal, individualized, interiorized, and normatively masculine self was assembled during the mid-sixteenth to early-eighteenth centuries. Here, Eve Keller offers a genealogy of that subject's supra-material autonomy. She draws our attention to profound similarities between Galenic and post-modern imaginings of the self. The early modern period is shown to stand in between: as a refutation of the “premodern” and “posthuman” (p. 20) notion of the self as extending beyond the envelope of the skin, to include not just language and comportment but also artefacts, spaces, places and objects. The fantastic and “alarming” (p. 31) imaginings of those neuroscientists, cyberneticists and philosophers of mind who suggest “embodiment, embeddedness and distributed capacity” (p. 23) are shown to be unsettling only from the liberal humanist perspective that we have inherited from the early modern period. Keller convincingly demonstrates this to be so through a lucid survey of some recent critical work carried out within cultural and science studies, which she compares to Galen's writings upon a materially-dependent soul of multiple components. The contrary humanist self is a “disembodied, vacuum-sealed centre of cognition and volition” (p. 44) and an enduring legacy of early modern thought. Keller's finely detailed investigation of vernacular medical texts in a variety of genres explicates the invention of this all-too-familiar self through the thought and practices of early modern physiology, anatomy and what we now call gynaecology and obstetrics. These practices produce an asymmetrical gendered human being. The materiality of the male serves his unified and disembodied supervenient self. The materiality of the female is a definitional body part (the womb) that her self is more or less conterminous with. Keller's concrete examples of seventeenth-century anatomical theories and practical physic for women evidence the success of such thinking, which survived the decline in Galenic models in favour of chemical medicine and mechanical philosophy. Although an enduring “thought style” (p. 13), to use the phrase Keller adopts from Ludwig Fleck, this gendered subjectivity was also problematic and troubling. For Keller, both the heroic and idealized images of masculinity and the investigative methods of the physician, the anatomist and the microscopist were fabricated in response to the perceived inadequacies of paternity and patriarchy. In the field of embryology, for example, animalculist theory is championed over ovist theory because it posits an independent, unified and self-affirming miniature person empowered—from the moment of his conception—to direct his own course. The autonomy and self-determination of the seventeenth-century self was threatened, she tells us, by mechanical conceptions of human physiology. The human machine is “a living object acted on by forces beyond its control” (p. 154). Thus, in response to this, the human is claimed as more than a machine. The final chapter of the book is located in the birthing room and provides a refreshing alternative to the often-rehearsed account of the rise of the man-midwife as either a triumph of scientific reason over ignorance or as the forcible ejection of capable female practitioners by “self-serving and avaricious” men (p. 160). Keller does not view such accounts as wrong, but rather as inadequate and partial. Her focus is upon specific and singular events that enable her to examine the rivalries and negotiated divisions of labour, so to speak, between the midwife, the surgeon and the physician in the early eighteenth century. For Keller, this is far from being merely a battle of the sexes. However, despite Keller's assertions to the contrary, there is some sense throughout this book of early modern aims regarding the self as having an epistemological and political essence: one of patriarchy as an organizing and orientating means for us to understand what happened and continues to happen when medicine addresses generation and childbirth. It would be fascinating to see explanations of how gender was assembled and distinguished that do not assume underlying and pre-given interests: those of males. None the less, Generating bodies and gendered selves is a brilliant example of how early modern history can benefit from a thorough and sustained engagement with the best scholarship in the fields of cultural theory and science studies.

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

Early Evidence-Based Medicine

The expression “evidence-based medicine” was probably coined at the McMaster University of Canada in the late 1980s and was largely supported by the science of statistics applied on medical research. The word “statistics” originated in eighteenth century Germany, its science, however, originated long before that. In this article we present some early clues of application of statistical principles on medicine from the Roman era, which, albeit rudimentary, contain many modern basic principles of statistics, like the concepts of sample size, mean, distribution of population, representativeness and randomization of the sample. Most clues come from Galen's writings and are probably cited for the first time with a statistical point of view. We also present one of the earlier randomized controlled trials of an antidote in history.

Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen: Biographie und Sozialgeschichte (review)

Galen, as gladiator doctor in Pergamum, friend of several members of the Roman upper class, and family physician of the emperors in Rome, was well acquainted with the living conditions of all strata of Roman society of the second century A.D. For the first time, in this book all of Galen's writings are analyzed as a contribution to the social history of the Roman Empire. The author considers the special perspective offered by Galen's background, career, and motives for writing. The material is presented first following Galen's biography; the study then branches out to chapters on slavery and other overarching aspects of the world Galen knew.

Who was Akilaos? A problem in medical historiography.

In the years before the conquest of Alexandria by the Arabs in 642, Alexandrian scholars produced compendia, summaries, and commentaries on Galen's writings and other works in the Hippocratic medical tradition. This paper concerns the identities of those Alexandrian commentators-two in particular, whose names are reported in Arabic texts, but about whom little else is known-and the routes by which Galenic medicine was transmitted to other parts of the Mediterranean world after Alexandria's fall. We review debates over the identity of "Akilaos" and "Anqilaos," and argue that "Akilaos" is not merely a scribal duplication, as some have supposed. Instead, we suggest a connection with the city of Aquileia in northern Italy, as a source for the name "Akilaos" and as a route by which Alexandrian medical texts reached northern Italy (where their Latin versions subsequently were associated with a "Ravenna school" of medicine).

Histoire de l'anatomie du thalamus de l'antiquité à la fin du XIXe siècle

The physicians of the Alexandrine school seem to have been able to follow the way of the optic nerves from the retina to the brain. It was very probable that they should discover the thalamus. Sadly, anatomic knowledge, deriving from the first scientific human dissection performed in history, was destroyed in the fire of the Alexandrine Library. When, in the second century A.D., Galen introduced the term opticus, he was describing the central part of the lateral ventricles of the brain. After Galen, an anatomy with philosophical inferences substituted an anatomy based on direct observation. At that time the purpose was to find the site of the soul. During the thirteen centuries following Galen, including the Byzantine epoch and the High Middle Ages, the knowledge of the anatomy of the central nervous system did not make any substantial progress. The deep location of the contributed, for a very long time, to make it invisible to the eyes of the anatomists. It was Mondino da Luzzi, during the thirteenth century A.D., who gave the first incontestable description of the thalamus. He named the anchae (buttocks). Nevertheless, we should also consider the hypothesis that Galen, from whom Mondino always got his inspiration, could already have used the Latin term nates to name the pulvinar of the thalamus. Three centuries later, Andreas Vesalius, the true father of modern anatomy, first illustrated the in his artwork De humani corporis fabrica (1543). The was perfectly represented by Vesalio. He provided figures of the with accurate legends in many brain sections with different perspectives but, strangely, he did not mention it in the text. In the seventeenth century, Jean Riolan and Thomas Willis inaugurated the use of the term thalamus in its actual meaning, probably as a consequence of an inaccurate interpretation or the transcription of Galen's writings. The has superbly been represented by Willis and Vieussens in their De CerebriAnatome (1664) and Neuronographia Universalis (1684). These works were the first monographs of the human history to be integrally devoted to the central nervous system. During the eighteenth century the anatomic illustration began to conform itself more to a scientific than an artistic approach. Nevertheless, despite the presence of the in most atlases, only little scientific progress was made in its understanding. During that century,Alexander Monro (Monro Primus, 1697-1767) described the hypothalamic sulcus and the interventricular foramens clarifying their topography with the thalamic walls. Giovanni Domenico Santorini (1681-1737) accurately reported the link between the optic tracts and the structure he first named as the lateral geniculate body of the thalamus. Francois Pourfour du Petit (1664-1741), Santorini and then Felix Vicq d'Azyr (1748-1794) described the mammillothalamic tract. The modern approach to thalamic morphology began with the improving of the microscopy and histology techniques. In this context, K. F. Burdach proposed to separate the into distinct nuclei (1823) and later Jean Luys established the link between this anatomic subdivision and the idea of a functional specialisation (1865). Since then, a great amount of, often imprecise or contradictory, anatomic-functional data has accumulated rapidly.

Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature Frederick W. Norris Robert M. Grant . Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Pp. x + 180. $17.00. Grant is at his best when his attention is focused on problems which many of us have looked at in pieces but have neither gathered together nor expressed with his clean prose and sharp wit. The audience this book can most help includes scholars who look with disdain on the "pre-critical" winners of early Christian struggles and Christian fundamentalists who know that "criticism" is the devilish invention of the Enlightenment or the not-so-enlightening creation of the Devil. As might be expected, however, those of us in between will be its most avid readers. The thesis is clear: Christians who became known as "heretics" had by the second century employed the critical tools of Hellenistic scholarship on the texts of the Christian tradition, particularly its emerging canon. But by the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria had used those tools in more "orthodox" projects. Later Origen, Dionysius of Alexandria and Jerome, as well as others, continued the process until both "lower and higher" criticism were commonly applied to the Bible. [End Page 361] The first remarkable critical project of early Christianity was that of Marcion who laid out a gospel that had no truck with Mark, Matthew or John or even found numerous interpolations in trusted Luke's text. Marcion's project was primarily a theological one, but he also used grammatical and stylistic judgments in making decisions. His work forced other Christian theologians to form various critical judgments. Irenaeus gave few reasons we find compelling, but he did settle on four gospels and a collection of Paul's letters. His results probably represent both Roman and Asia Minor traditions. Origen employed many Hellenistic textual and grammatical tools worked out by Hellenists on their tradition. Both Julius Africanus and Jerome brought such historical-critical efforts into the discussions among more "orthodox" theologians with the result that centrist Christianity baptized these methods for following generations. One of the strengths of Grant's book is that he looks at the efforts of Ptolemaeus and Apelles, Gnostic Christian critics, not only in separate chapters but also in the context of the general study of texts during the period. He devotes one chapter to "literary criticism in early Christian times" and another to Galen's writings on the problems with texts of Hippocrates. The questions dealt with in this volume continue to agitate us. Queries about the authorship of New Testament documents or some patristic pieces are rats' nests, particularly when we have so little literature written by ancient Christians and too often nearly nothing about them. Some New Testament books are actually anonymous, including the crucial gospels, while most if not all Gnostic gospels claim to be written by an apostle. At times when names are given, we do not know which John, James or Jude. The criteria we apply can be odd although very old. The pastoral epistles were not written by Paul because the vocabulary and themes are so different from the seven authentic letters. Vocabulary lists were used by ancient critics to establish authorship. Dionysius of Alexandria, on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and style, judged the Apocalypse to be the work of some John other than the one who wrote the Gospel and I John. What frustrated ancient critics still frustrates us. If we had the same measly information about Wittengenstein or Heidegger that we have for New Testament authors, and the same tantalizing kinds of apparent cross references, would we be able to tell that their early and late works were written by the same persons? Certainly not on the basis of vocabulary and theme. And if authorial intent is so difficult to discover even for volumes whose authors have good biographies, we may press it too far in many of our interpretations. The interpolation industry, warned about in the Apocalypse, was operating well in the Hellenistic era. Long before that period Herodotus had insisted that Onomacritus "edited the oracles of Musaeus and...

The Medical Aphorisms of Moses Maimonides.

This book offers a marvelously detailed account of medicine as it existed in the thirteenth century in the most civilized regions in the West, those held by the Arabs. Maimonides, like his Arab precursors and contemporaries, considered himself one of the inheritors of classical Greek learning. Like some of them, eg, al Farabi and Razi among the Arabs, and Rabbi Schem Tov among the Jews, Maimonides did not accept this inheritance uncritically, and much space is given to showing the inconsistencies in Galen's writings and in making a plea for rational observation. (These preceded the similar plea by Roger Bacon by half a century. Both were ignored.) Medicine in that era was a mass of superstition, false science, and assorted bits of folklore. As regards the last, it is interesting that both Galen and Maimonides mentioned the suicide via snake bite of a Queen of Egypt without giving her name;

Moses Maimonides

THE January issue of Medical Life is a Maimonides number containing an account by Prof. Louis Gershenfeld, of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, of the Hispano-Jewish physician, astronomer and theologian, Moses Maimonides or Abu Amran Musa Ben Maimon, on the occasion of the octocentenary of his birth. Born at Cordova in Spain on March 30, 1135, he studied under Averrhocs, and in 1160 left Spain for Fez, finally settling in 1165 at Cairo, where he died on December 13, 1204. His best-known medical work is a collection of 1,500 aphorisms from Galen's writings with forty-two critical comments. His other chief medical works are a treatise on diet and personal hygiene written at the request of Saladin's eldest son, who suffered from melancholia, and a book on poisons and antidotes. In a work on astronomy, he recognised the limitations of astrology, and declared that all works on the subject were the products of fools. He differentiated between astrology and astronomy, maintaining that in the latter only was to be found true and necessary knowledge. His most famous work, however, was the “Guide for the Perplexed”, which was not intended for popular consumption, but claimed to be written by a philosopher to the philosophically minded, his purpose being to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology and the doctrines of Judaism.