Galen On Anatomical Procedures; The Later Books

For centuries, only the first eight books and part of the ninth of Galen's De Anatomicis Administrationibus have been available, the most recent edition having been published by the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 1956 as translated by Charles Singer into English from Greek. No Greek manuscript of the last part of book nine and books ten through fifteen is known, but the Bodleian Library acquired an Arabic manuscript in 1714, and the British Museum received another in 1860. No other copies of the text have turned up. In 1906, Max Simon of Leipzig published a critical Arabic text based on the two manuscripts in British libraries, together with a German translation. In the early 1950's, the Cambridge anatomist, W. L. H. Duckworth, translated Simon's German version, but he had not finished working on the translation when he died in 1956. Subsequently, M. C. Lyons, a Cambridge Arabic scholar, critically compared Duckworth's translation with Simon's Arabic text, making some three thousand notes, and B. Travers, another Cambridge anatomist, made changes in the English text. Clearly, this translation has been through competent hands. Galen was the first great experimental physiologist and, in the ancient world at least, an incomparable anatomist. His work is of fundamental importance to an understanding of the modern development of these subjects. In this volume there is available for the first time in English the last part of the book "On the Brain" and "The Face, Mouth and Pharynx," "The Larynx and Associated Structures," "The Generative Organs and Foetal Development," "On the Veins and Arteries," "The Cranial Nerves," and "The Spinal Nerves." The majority of observations which Galen presents are his own. His findings on the topics listed are not to be found exclusively in this volume, for Galen was a prolific and repetitive writer. Still, the work contains a host of information not available elsewhere in English. Everyone having but a slight historical interest in the subjects treated in this excellent volume should acquire it, for it contains the first major contributions to these areas of investigation. FREDERICK G. KILGOUR.