Book Reviews

Abstract

PHILLIP DE LACY (editor, translator and commentator), Galeni De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis Libri IV, (Corpus Medicorum Graecorum V 4, 1, 2), Berlin, DDR, Akademie Verlag, 1978, 8vo, pp. 359, 98M. Reviewed by Vivian Nutton, M. A., Ph.D., Wellcome Institutefor the History of Medicine, 183 Euston Road, London NW) 2BP. With this publication, Professor De Lacy, Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University ofPennsylvania, has brought forth the first fruits ofmany years of scholarly labour and more than fulfilled our hopes of its high quality. An important work of Galen has now at last received an edition worthy of its merits. The overall plan of this edition is that the first two volumes contain the text and English translation, the last two a detailed commentary. Volume I, which begins with a long introduction on manuscripts, editions, the date and plan of PHP and on Galenic stylistics, continues with an edition of the Greek text of Books 1 to 5, a subordinate apparatus of variant readings and testimonia, and a facing translation. This translation , the first into a modern European language, reads fluently; and the text, which uses for the first time the oldest surviving MS., Berlin, Hamilton 270, as well as evidence from the church father Nemesius of Emesa and from the Arabs, is an immense improvement over the 1874 edition of von Muller. It is appropriate here to note the major contribution made to the text by Benedict Einarson, who, alas, did not live to see it in print: De Lacy's edition will stand as a fitting memorial to the selflessness of his friend. The collations of the various MSS. are accurate (I observe two minor errors: 78.21 Caius in mg.; inciderit Caius in versione: 78.23 add. Caius in mg.), the printing impeccable, and only the binding, which, in the reviewer's copy, was not properly stuck down, failed to live up to the high standards we have come to expect of Dr. Kollesch and her staff of the Corpus Medicorum in Berlin. 'On the opinions of Plato and Hippocrates' (PHP) is a rambling work, full of digressions, difficult to analyse, yet one of the most important in the Galenic corpus, for a variety of reasons. In the first place, it is an attempt to solve scientifically problems in human physiology and to draw "moral" or "philosophical" consequences from them: it is a philosophical meditation on the facts revealed elsewhere in Anatomical procedures. Although Galen's self-appointed task, to reconcile Plato's views on the tripartite soul with those of Hippocrates on the powers that control animal activity, seems to us essentially misguided and Galen himself later rejected some of his Hippocratic evidence as spurious -, he was trying to bring scientific method into an area distinguished, so he alleged, only by modern philosophical madness. A lack of logic, a failure to appreciate the facts of life, and an uncritical adherence to the views of one's school, especially the Stoic, are here vigorously attacked and disproved by better logic (demonstrative or apodeictic method) and by the results of anatomical experiment. Galen's public dissections in A.D. 163 of the spinal vertebrae of animals showed beyond doubt that the brain, not the heart, controlled the nerves, and that it was the source of "psychic" power. The consequences of this for Plato's theory of the dominance of the "rational" soul over its "spirited" and "appetitive" parts are obvious: Plato stands confirmed against Aristotle and the Stoics in the rightness of his cerebrocentricity. Anatomy and Galenic commonsense are called in to redress the