was a very entertaining book, Makes one thankful for the progression of technology and medicine, Apart from whatever merit Galen's work has, this is a terrible edition, Amateurish, cheap, antiquated, and typoridden, I've heard this comes in the superb Loeb edition, and if you're really interested in Galen, no doubt that's the one to get.
Back to Galen himself, The man made some progress, but was still incredibly ignorant about the way the body worked, And to jump from him to Harvey is to instantly realize how startlingly little medicine progressed between Galen's time and thes A.
D. Saddening, but interesting and very much in contrast with the speedy march of new advances in the field in the last century.
Galen is debatably less wrong than the earlier Greek physicians whom he so viciously decries, but his crude anatomical theories have little bearing on modern medicine.
This edition is poorly edited and poorly laid out, The Loeb Classics edition is much better, but really, why bother It's a most systematic and authoritative argument for his own take on scientific medicine in his day and make no wonder Marcus Aurelius wanted him as his personal doctor when off to fight the Germans and not much at Galen's stubbornly staying in Pergamum in preference.
A historical medical treatise upon the Natural Facultiesabilities which an organism or organ, for that matter has and can use.
The latter clause being important because merely having an ability is meaningless without the use of it.
For example, Galen's faculty of elimination in the uterus is only a faculty because the uterus both has the ability to eliminate and uses it when the fetus is ready to be born or a problem has occurred requiring evacuation of it's corpse.
What Galen does for most of the treatise is critique his fellow medicinemen, desiring to disprove theories of molecules and atoms in favor of continuous matter.
The theories that he goes up against are all of themselves rather absurd, and he acquits himself well, perhaps, in some of his arguments, even as we know that he is arguing, ultimately, from the wrong side of things.
It is hard, however, to hear someone argue for the transference of urine from the liver to the bladder via vapor as credible, especially when the tubes connecting said organs exist.
Of course, Galen, in the modern sense, is neither empiricist or idealist, He will use a priori arguments to prove, or seem to prove, pointssuch, for example, is the means by which he first suggests that, if we assume an attractive factor, and that nature
is artistic all things have a purpose, it must be true that an adhesive or retentive faculty existsthe attraction of certain material meaning little when it all simply decides to go away.
However, when thus he proposes the possibility of this retentive faculty, he continues to give evidences through experimentation and description of the proposed faculty.
The uterus, he states, contains the fetus until birth, When he fed pigs a wheat mixture and chopped them open a few hours later, the wheat was still in the stomach.
Etc.
What, I suppose, I find most applicable to modern science is merely the means by which Galen is willing to come to conclusionsthrough logic and through experiment.
His experiment upon bladders and the kidneys, for example, is superb at proving that urine comes through the ureters into the bladder and expulses itself via the urethra.
One must, if anything, read this experiment's description,
I cannot think that this book is insightful in it's medical knowledge, It follows the humorist view of medicine sanguinary, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, decides that all things come from four basic states heat, cold, dry, moist, and misrepresents a lot of information eg.
, he believes that semen does not fertilize: it feeds upon blood to grow into a fetus and that matter is continuous.
Some aspects of his philosophysuch, for example, as the difference between alteration and transference, between things that happen and things that are active or caused by a facultyare perhaps fine, however.
Perhaps the collector of interesting details would enjoy this, The story about Ionian children blowing up a pig's bladder, rubbing it on ashes near a fire, and blowing it up some more, suggests interest more than dullness, one must think.
I found this text oddly invigorating, Galen is very fastpaced and his thought is altogether interesting there is not very often a dull moment.
In some sense, this is due to the material provided, His arguments and the picture into the period at which he was writing is, of course, always interesting.
In another sense, this is due to Galen himselffor Galen hates his ideological opponents, notwithstanding his ideological leanings but, of course, he is arguing for the truth, not like his fellows who were wrong!, and this hatred is at times rather more humorous than otherwise.
As I proceeded through the pages about urine, bile and digestion, I had difficulty understanding why Galen was included in Britannicas Great Books list.
Then I came to this passage near the end:
While, however, the statements which the Ancients made on these points were correct, they yet omitted to defend their arguments with logical proofs of course they never suspected that there could be sophists so shameless as to try to contradict obvious facts.After some outside research i, e. Wikipedia and Google, it became apparent that Galen was the authority on medicine until the Renaissance, His authoritative claims went unchallenged for over a millennia,
More recent physicians, again, have been partly conquered by the sophistries of these fellows and have given credence to them whilst others who attempted to argue with them appear to me to lack to a great extent the power of the Ancients.
For this reason I have attempted to put together my arguments in the way in which it seems to me the Ancients, had any of them been still alive, would have done, in opposition to those who would overturn the finest doctrines of our art.
I am not, however, unaware that I shall achieve either nothing at all or else very little.
For I find that a great many things which have been conclusively demonstrated by the Ancients are unintelligible to the bulk of the Moderns owing to their ignorance nay, that, by reason of their laziness, they will not even make an attempt to comprehend them and even if any of them have understood them, they have not given them impartial examination.
The fact is that he whose purpose is to know anything better than the multitude do must far surpass all others both as regards his nature and his early training.
And when he reaches early adolescence he must become possessed with an ardent love for truth, like one inspired neither day nor night may he cease to urge and strain himself in order to learn thoroughly all that has been said by the most illustrious of the Ancients.
And when he has learnt this, then for a prolonged period he must test and prove it, observing what part of it is in agreement, and what in disagreement with obvious fact thus he will choose this and turn away from that.
To such an one my hope has been that my treatise would prove of the very greatest assistance.
Still, such people may be expected to be quite few in number, while, as for the others, this book will be as superfluous to them as a tale told to an ass.
pgs.
Galen does not hide his contempt for his contemporaries who classify themselves as “Erasistrateans” or “Asclepiadeans.
” Galen considered himself beyond such labels and dedicated himself to critical analysis, He suffers no fools as he haughtily dismisses the theories that fail to survive his experimentation and logical conclusions.
A true empiricist, he devotes himself to questioning all theories and constructing medical proofs while simultaneously reverently referring to his predecessors whom he deemed worthy especially Hippocrates and Aristotle.
Though Galens importance in medical history is probably not much debated, the actual work itself yields little to anyone today except medical historians.
Galen was referring to his contemporaries in the above quote but, sadly, On the Natural Faculties is not a timeless work and, to myself and most readers, will truly be as “superfluous as a tale told to an ass.
”.