On the Natural Faculties — Galen
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org . If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title : Galen: On the Natural Faculties Author : Galen Translator : Arthur John Brock Release date : August 2, 2013 [eBook #43383] Language : English, Greek, Ancient Other information and formats : www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43383 Credits : Produced by Eileen Gormly, Turgut Dincer, Ted Garvin and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net *** START OF The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. GALEN ON THE NATURAL FACULTIES WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY ARTHUR JOHN BROCK, M.D. EDINBURGH LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN NEW YORK : G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS MCMXVI Pg v PREFACE The text used is (with a few unimportant modifications) that of Kühn (Vol. II), as edited by Georg Helmreich; Teubner, Leipzig, 1893. The numbers of the pages of Kühn’s edition are printed at the side of the Greek text, a parallel mark (||) in the line indicating the exact point of division between Kühn’s pages. Words in the English text which are enclosed in square brackets are supplementary or explanatory; practically all explanations, however, are relegated to the footnotes or introduction. In the footnotes, also, attention is drawn to words which are of particular philological interest from the point of view of modern medicine. I have made the translation directly from the Greek; where passages of special difficulty occurred, I have been able to compare my own version with Linacre’s Latin translation (1523) and the French rendering of Charles Daremberg (1854-56); in this respect I am also peculiarly fortunate in having had the help of Mr. A. W. Pickard Cambridge of Balliol College, Oxford, who most kindly went through the Pg vi proofs and made many valuable suggestions from the point of view of exact scholarship. My best thanks are due to the Editors for their courtesy and for the kindly interest they have taken in the work. I have also gratefully to acknowledge the receipt of much assistance and encouragement from Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and from Dr. J. D. Comrie, first lecturer on the History of Medicine at Edinburgh University. Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson of University College, Dundee, and Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, late director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have very kindly helped me to identify several animals and plants mentioned by Galen. I cannot conclude without expressing a word of gratitude to my former biological teachers, Professors Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. The experience reared on the foundation of their teaching has gone far to help me in interpreting the great medical biologist of Greece. I should be glad to think that the present work might help, however little, to hasten the coming reunion between the “humanities” and modern biological science; their present separation I believe to be against the best interest of both. A. J. B. 22nd Stationary Hospital, Aldershot . March , 1916. Pg vii-viii CONTENTS page preface v introduction ix bibliography xli synopsis of chapters xliii book i 1 book ii 117 book iii 223 index and glossary 335 Pg ix INTRODUCTION Hippocrates and Galen. If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of Galen, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit or apex of the same edifice. Galen’s merit is to have crystallised or brought to a focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages. The Beginnings of Medicine in Greece. The ancient Greeks referred the origins of medicine to a god Asklepios (called in Latin Aesculapius), thereby testifying to their appreciation of the truly divine function of the healing art. The emblem of Aesculapius, familiar in medical symbolism at the present day, was a staff with a serpent coiled round it, the animal typifying wisdom in general, and more particularly the wisdom of the medicine-man, with his semi-miraculous powers over life and death. Pg x “ Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves. ” The Asclepiea or Health-Temples. The temples of Aesculapius were scattered over the ancient Hellenic world. To them the sick and ailing resorted in crowds. The treatment, which was in the hands of an hereditary priesthood, combined the best of the methods carried on at our present-day health-resorts, our hydropathics, sanatoriums, and nursing-homes. Fresh air, water-cures, massage, gymnastics, psychotherapy, and natural methods in general were chiefly relied on. Hippocrates and the Unity of the Organism. Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” (5th to 4th centuries, B.C. ) was associated with the Asclepieum of Cos, an island off the south-west coast of Asia Minor, near Rhodes. He apparently revitalized the work of the health-temples, which had before his time been showing a certain decline in vigour, coupled with a corresponding excessive tendency towards sophistry and priestcraft. Celsus says: “ Hippocrates Cous primus quidem ex omnibus memoria dignis ab studio sapientiae disciplinam hanc separavit .” He means that Hippocrates first gave the physician an independent standing, separating him from the cosmological speculator. Hippocrates confined the medical man to medicine. He did with medical thought what Socrates did with thought in general—he “brought it down from heaven to earth.” His watchword was “Back to Nature!” At the same time, while assigning the physician his post, Hippocrates would not let him regard that post as sacrosanct. He set his face against any Pg xi tendency to mystery-mongering, to exclusive