The historian of ancient medicine has in recent years enjoyed one advantage over his more literary colleagues, the regular accession of substantial new texts by major authors. These have included not only fragments preserved on papyri and the membra disiecta gathered from later encyclopaedias and medical writings, but also complete treatises, some consisting of several books. There is, however, one drawback. Very few of these new texts are preserved in their original language, or even in a mediaeval Latin translation; most (...) are to be found in versions done into Syriac, Arabic, or Hebrew, and hence they remain inaccessible to the average classicist without the intermediary of a further translation into a Western language. Besides, when such modern translations exist, they are not always easy to locate, even in the best-regulated libraries, and the supposed aridity of their contents acts as a further barrier to the dissemination of their information to students of ancient history and ancient philosophy. This paper is intended to bring to wider notice the most recent of such arrivals, and, by concentrating on what it has to say about Antonine society, to draw the attention of ancient historians to material that they might well overlook. (shrink)
The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the many (...) tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends. (shrink)
(2008). ‘It’s the Patient’s Fault’: Simone Simoni and the Plague of Leipzig, 1575 1 . Intellectual History Review: Vol. 18, Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era, pp. 5-13.
In this forgotten treatise, preserved largely in medieval translations into Arabic and Latin, the greatest medical scientist of antiquity investigates the relationship between conscious and unconscious movements. He looks at the structure of the tongue and the oesophagus, and asks why mental perceptions can have physical effects on the body. Some of his questions still trouble modern scientists, although they would not accept most of his answers. The extensive Introduction and Commentary explain the medical background for non-medical specialists, and discuss (...) the place of this treatise and of anatomy in medieval medicine down to Leonardo da Vinci. As well as being the first English translation of this important work, this is also the first comparative study of medieval translations of the same ancient text, and is based on new editions and collations of all three. The Commentary pays special attention to the linguistic elements involved in making these translations. (shrink)
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 of On 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 variously De sententiis, De sententiis medicorum, and De 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. (shrink)
The private physicians of the Roman emperors with the exception of Galen are shadowy figures whose origins, friends, and political influence can only rarely be glimpsed. G. Stertinius Xenophon obtained immunity from taxation for his native island of Cos, and ‘L’. Statilius Griton may have secured certain privileges from Trajan for the Museum of Ephesus, but these are isolated instances. Their social position is similarly hard to define: no doctor entered the senate and equestrian rank was the most that could (...) be obtained. But, if social prejudices prevented them from becoming senators, their descendants were free from such restraints, and in the turbulent Roman society of the late second century upward mobility was not difficult. (shrink)
It is a brave scholar who ventures into the murky world of Late Antique medicine in search of information on earlier theories. Not only may the opinions of a Herophilus or a Galen be distorted by their distant interpreters, but frequently the texts themselves present serious challenges to understanding. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Latin versions made from Greek philosophical and medical commentaries, which interpose an additional linguistic barrier before one can make sense of sometimes complex arguments. (...) Yet as R. J. Hankinson has shown in his recent note on John of Alexandria, there is much to be gained from these forbidding works. But while he has succeeded in elucidating much of the technical terminology and argument that lies behind one of these translations, his lack of familiarity with the textual basis of the relevant commentary has both led him into error and prevented him from resolving still more of its difficulties. His ignorance is easily pardonable, for, as will be shown, modern editors have unwittingly conspired to block the way to the truth, and the essential secondary literature has been published in journals and theses rarely accessible to the classicist. (shrink)
