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Dr Lee Pearcy FEATURES (/INDEX.PHP/FEATURES) 2 days ago

Galen and His Books

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by Dr Lee T. Pearcy, Bryn Mawr College

 

Imagine that you have gathered your furniture, your

computer, your precious possessions, perhaps art
you have made, your journal or your family
photographs, all the things that cannot be replaced,

and locked them in a rented storage facility that,

you are assured, is fireproof and guarded by

soldiers. Now imagine that the unthinkable

happens. The storage facility has caught fire, and everything that you put there has
been destroyed. Would you grieve at the loss?
 

In a.d. 192 fire broke out near the center of Rome and quickly spread to the Temple

of Peace next to the Forum. The great building’s wooden superstructure and the
artworks and treasures displayed inside went up in flames. The Forum itself and the

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Temple of Vesta were soon burning, and the fire even spread to the imperial palaces

on the Palatine. A century earlier the emperor Domitian had built a huge complex of
warehouses next to the Temple of Peace to store pepper and other imported spices.

These too were caught up in the blaze, and fragrant smoke spread over the city.
 

Private citizens could rent space in these warehouses, the Horrea Piperataria or
Pepper Warehouse and the Horrea Vespasiani next to it. The physician Galen had

rented one of these storage rooms. It contained, he tells us, not only gold and silver,
silverware, and financial documents—Galen was a wealthy man—but also things that

were far more important to him: his books, including many rare and irreplaceable

volumes; large quantities of expensive, hard to find ingredients for medicines; and

medical instruments, along with wax models of instruments that he had invented.
Other professional and learned men had also rented space in the warehouses, and

some of them were prostrated by grief at their losses; one of them, the literary

scholar Philippides, committed suicide when he learned that his books had been lost.

Yet Galen seemed unaffected by the loss of so many of his most valuable

possessions. How, his friends wondered, was he able to remain so unmoved? They

were not surprised that he bore the loss of money, financial documents, and
treasured furniture so calmly; what astonished them was that he could endure the

loss of his books and professional equipment.

 

We know all this because Galen answered his friends in a treatise called On the
Avoidance of Grief, and because in 2005, Antoine Pietrobelli, a young scholar
investigating manuscripts in the Vlatadon monastery in Thessaloniki, found the

treatise miscataloged in a collection of Galen’s autobiographical writings. Galen

mentions On the Avoidance of Grief in one of his other works, On My Own Books,
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but it had not been heard of since the thirteenth century, when a physician named

Joseph ibn Aknin translated bits of it into Arabic. The first printed edition, edited by

the French scholar Véronique Boudon-Millot and Pietrobelli, was published in 2007.
 

Books were important to Galen. He wrote a lot—or rather, dictated a lot to his slave

secretaries. His surviving writings run to more than 20,000 pages in the most nearly

complete modern edition and amount to about ten per cent of all ancient Greek

literature before a.d. 350. As the example of On the Avoidance of Grief shows, new or
newly rediscovered works continue to add to this total. During his lifetime he was a

famous physician, consulted by leading families in Rome and by the emperors

Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and his writings made him even more influential

after his death. Galen, in fact, may be the most important physician between

Hippocrates in the fifth century b.c. and William Harvey in the seventeenth century
a.d. His ideas shaped the study of medicine in Europe until Harvey’s lifetime and

beyond; in fact, that 20,000-page modern edition, published between 1821 and 1833,

has an index that shows it was intended for the use of physicians, not classical

scholars. Galen’s ideas, as filtered by the great Persian scholar Ibn Sina (980–1037)

remain the foundation of Yunani or Unani (that is, “Ionian” or Greek) medicine, a

major tradition in the modern Islamic world.

 

Galen thought of himself as a physician before all else, and if I had been ill in the
second century, I would have wanted him at my bedside. Despite this, many of his

writings are philosophical or linguistic in nature, because, as he explains in his short

book, The Best Physician is Also a Philosopher, he believed that medicine was

philosophy in action. Galen never wrote an autobiography in the strict sense, but he
tells us a great deal about himself along the way to talking about medicine and
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philosophy; On the Avoidance of Grief, for example, uses Galen’s story of how he
responded to the loss of his property as a springboard to launch into a philosophical
account of the arguments in favor of suppressing emotion. One thing that we learn is

that he was not very good at suppressing emotion, or at least some kinds of emotion.
 

Galen was intensely competitive. He delights in telling stories about cases where he
was called in after all other physicians had given up or occasions when he was able

to score a victory in debate. Once, after his treatise On the Usefulness of the Parts of
the Body had
gained a
reputation, a
rumor went

around the city

that in it he had

described
anatomical

structures that
could not be seen in dissection. At first, he tells us, “my only response was
contemptuous amusement,” but soon his friends (he says) begged him to give a

public demonstration of his skill and knowledge. He refused, but his rivals kept going
to the Temple of Peace, where people interested in learned matters met, and making

fun of him. Finally Galen gave in, hired a hall, and over several days gave a
demonstration that was part anatomical lesson, part medical history lecture, and
part theatre. Books were part of the act. Galen piled the books of all the writers on

anatomy in front of him and challenged the audience to name a part of the body;
Galen would then dissect it—using animals, not human cadavers—and show how his

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description differed from those of his predecessors. Needless to say, Galen succeeded

—and got another book, the now lost Lycus’ Ignorance in Anatomy, out of the
experience. (He tells the story in chapter 2 of On My Own Books.)
 

Galen was not the only one to delight in public intellectual competition; in fact, his

competitive streak puts him firmly in the context of the cultural movement called
the Second Sophistic. Galen was born in a.d. 129 and died sometime in the first
decades of the third century. During his lifetime public intellectuals or “sophists”

dominated public life in the Greek-speaking part of the Roman world. Sophists were
celebrities, rhetorical rock stars who wielded rhetoric, the art of speaking in public,

like a weapon in their public performances. Galen belongs in their company.

 

No one would now consult Galen’s writings for medical advice, but modern-day
philosophers and historians of philosophy have rediscovered him as a philosopher

and scientist who belongs in the company of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, and
Archimedes. His vivid accounts of his practice bring the high Roman Empire to life.
Finally, Galen himself provokes a response from readers. From his pages he emerges

as competitive, cranky, disciplined, humorless, and self-absorbed—not, for most

readers, a likable man, but without question a great physician and philosopher.
 

 
 

FURTHER READING
 

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Fortunately we now have two excellent biographical introductions to Galen, one in

English and one in French: Susan P. Mattern, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the

Roman Empire (Oxford 2013) and Véronique Boudon-Millot, Galien de Pergame: un

médecin grec à Rome (Paris 2012); I reviewed both at Bryn Mawr Classical Review
2014.01.29 (online at bmcr.brynmawr.edu). Galen: Selected Works, translated by P.

N. Singer in the Oxford World’s Classics series (1997) contains a useful choice from
Galen’s works, including On My Own Books and The Best Physician is Also a

Philosopher. A translation of On the Avoidance of Grief can be found in Galen:

Psychological Writings, a volume in the new Cambridge Galen Translations, edited
by P. N. Singer (2013). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Galen,”

http://www.iep.utm.edu/galen/, gives a good introduction to Galen as a philosopher.

On Galen and the Second Sophistic, the chapter on Galen in G. W. Bowersock, Greek

Sophists in the Roman Empire (1969) remains useful. For ancient medicine in
general, see G. Majno, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World
(1975) and V. Nutton, Ancient Medicine (2004).
 

 
 

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