Galen and the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body

Latin et mis en bel ordre par questions et responses pour la facilite des jeunes etudians en Chirurgie' (par A.E.B.D.C.I. Paris 1659). This title perhaps best epitomizes the significance attached to Galen's masterpiece on physiology and its anatomical basis. It shows its use as the authoritative textbook for students in general and those of surgery in particular. The edition of the version cited appeared two years after the death of Harvey. It was presented broken up into a series of questions and answers-a difficult and often lengthy argumentative text-made easy to digest for the learner-surgeon. From him, unlike his medical commilitones, no sufficient time and working knowledge of Latin (let alone of Greek) could be expected for a perusal of the extant Latin translations of the original. It is perhaps no accident that such a work should appear in several editions in France at that time-the age of Guy Patin and Riolan. In fact, France was the only country to produce a translation of the full text in the vernacular, starting with the classic It was finally in France and at a quite different level in historical criticism that the standard translation was produced by Charles Daremberg (1854-1856). This work has been indispensable for generations of historians and medical readers at large. There has been no English translation and only the fragment of a German version (1805). This situation is now changed through the publication of the work under notice. It can be said at once that it is a monument of scholarship and of the highest value. This applies not only to the help that can be derived from the translations as such, but also to the revision of the text, based as it is on first-hand (including manuscript) sources, and to the multitude of learned explanatory notes that are here offered. The work thus meets a special need felt today. For again Galen has emerged from a cloud. In the early years of this century he was uncritically summed up as a Seichbeutel (Windbag) by the prince of critical classicists Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. Against this the dissenting voices of Julius Pagel and Theodor Meyer-Steineg had little chance to be heard. The label has been re-used the more often the less the patience of the writers grew with Galen's rationality and teleology and the shorter the narratives became. Galen's brilliant and far advanced experimental observations and demonstrations, especially on …