Die Schrift des Rufus von Ephesos über die Gelbsucht

The greater part of this book is devoted to a study of Aristotle's theory of heredity in the De generatione animalium. Morsink argued that Aristotle is there engaging in dialectical dispute against the pangenesis theory of inheritance as advocated in "Hippocrates" On semen and On the nature of the child, and that Aristotle's own explanation in terms of form provided by the male parent and matter by the female is advanced as a scientific hypothesis better able to explain the facts. Some scholars have gone wrong, Morsink argues, in emphasizing the simple form-matter theory of book I without due regard to the part played by "powers" (dunameis) from both male and female in the more complex theory of book 4; on the other hand, he claims, the theory of book 4 is a development of the initial theory of book I and not in effect a rejection of it. In the first chapter of the work, Morsink argues that Aristotle's approach in De gen. an. is in accord with his remarks on the usefulness of dialectical argument to the scientist in Topics 1.2, but not in accord with the strictly inductive approach put forward in Posterior analytics 2.19. Nor is the conflict to be explained, he argues, in terms of Owen's contrast between a priori principles established by dialectic, on the one hand, and empirical observations on the other. Morsink himself offers no explanation of the conflict; he is clearly right to try to relate it to Aristotle's actual practice in a scientific treatise. The book is well produced from typescript; I noticed a few minor misprints. At p. 120 line I 1 "against" should be "gains". Professor Ullmann continues his rehabilitation of the writings of Rufus of Ephesus, fl. AD 1 10, the only doctor of Antiquity to rival Galen as an author and clinician of genius. By careful scholarship he shows that from fragments in a Greek medical encyclopaedia, an Arabic summary preserved among the rubbish in the Cairo Geniza and another wrongly catalogued in Berlin, and a medieval Latin translation of the therapeutic sections, but wrongly ascribed to Galen, it is possible to reconstruct large parts of this lost Greek work on jaundice. He himself provides a German translation of the Arabic, but not, unfortunately, of the Greek or Latin; he offers a brief commentary also upon the Arabic, concentrating in particular on the drugs recommended, and …