Nutton, V

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Medical Historyhttp://journals.cambridge.org/MDHAdditional services for Medical History:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click here Galen, Galien. Tome II: Exhortation à l'étude de lamédecine. Art médical, ed. and trans. Veronique Boudon,Collection des Universites de France, Paris, Les BellesLettres, 2000, pp. 454, Fr400 (hardback 2-251-00483-1).Vivian NuttonMedical History / Volume 45 / Issue 04 / October 2001, pp 560 - 562DOI: 10.1017/S0025727300068642, Published online: 16 November 2012Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0025727300068642How to cite this article:Vivian Nutton (2001). Medical History, 45, pp 560-562 doi:10.1017/S0025727300068642Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/MDH, IP address: 144.82.107.68 on 12 Nov 2013Book Reviewsquestions. He claims to offer moreconvincing explanations of extraordinaryachievements than the usual fall-backoption of attributing whatever it is that wemay term "genius" to some mysterious,magical, undefined "special innate gift".Howe thus adds his contribution to thenature versus nurture debate. Can people beborn geniuses? The simple answer, inHowe's account, is no. The whole work isdedicated to proving that sophisticatedinborn capacities cannot exist, andconcludes that the difference betweencreative problem-solvers and ordinarypeople lies far more in the degree ofeffortrather than in the presence or absence ofany innate ability. Yet throughout the book,Howe is careful to point out that hisapproach to analysing genius does not seekto detract from the idea that geniuses arespecial.Howe is a Professor of Psychology atExeter University. As a scientist, he isattracted by the desire to quantify andexplain; he admits that he is daring to treadwhere others have deemed the terrainimpossible. Defining the terms of reference,especially the term "genius" itself, in such aproject is exceedingly difficult. Howedetermines to consider in his study anyindividual whose claims to genius havereceived a substantial measure ofsupport i.e. those about whom the term"genius" may be popularly used. In hisanalysis Howe advocates employing thedisciplines of biography (using evidence ofthe genius's early advances andcircumstances to reveal the origins of his orher genius), and psychology (which hedefines as the ways in which people areaffected by their biology and theirinfluences). This psycho-biographicalapproach he admits is necessarily limiting.Detailed biographical information on aperson's early childhood is distinctly scarcefor many of the early historical geniuses.Thus he is compelled to confine himself to asurvey of obvious characters principallyfrom the nineteenth century (such asCharles Darwin and George Stephenson),and the twentieth century (for instanceAlbert Einstein).This book does not pretend to explicatehow contemporaries may have employedthe term genius to describe the prestigiouspeople of their times. Hence, whileundoubtedly of great value for apsychologist, the place of this book in thelibrary of a medical historian is unclear.Howe's intention was not to write history;he looks back on the past two centurieswith the values and knowledge of the latetwentieth. Yet it does have uses for thehistorian: it is an enjoyable, fluently-writtensurvey, providing interesting overviews ofthe early lives of some of the most famousfigures of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. In his own terms, Howe hasexplained genius, but to use the termhistorically as he defines it is anachronistic.The reader should keep in mind thatHowe's book is and was intended to be aproduct of late-twentieth-centurypsychology and the study ofbiography,rather than an accurate reading of the term"genius" in history.Caroline Essex,The Wellcome Trust Centre for the Historyof Medicine at UCLGalen, Galien. Tome II: Exhortation a'l'e'tude de la medecine. Art medical, ed. andtrans. Veronique Boudon, Collection desUniversites de France, Paris, Les BellesLettres, 2000, pp. 454, Fr400 (hardback 2-251-00483-1).The Bude edition of Galen has started offwith a big bang with two introductorytreatises of very different types and withvery different problems for an editor. ThatMme Boudon has managed to resolve themand to offer her readers enlightenment onso many aspects of Galen, and of textual560Book Reviewscriticism, is a magnificent achievement thatfew can match.The first treatise, the Protrepticus, nolonger survives today in a Greekmanuscript, or in an oriental translation,and an editor can do little more thancorrect the Greek of the 1525 Aldine from aknowledge of Galen's style and of goodGreek. A new discovery in Hebrew,however, gives an idea of the opening of thesecond part of the book, which is otherwisetotally lost to us. Mme Boudon takes amore conservative line than most editors,usually wisely, although, very occasionally,her notes show that she has not appreciatedthe force of the argument for change. Thisdoes not mean that previous suggestions arenecessarily right, although I am convincedthat Sch6ne's deletion of the first line of thebook's title is the best way of dealing withGreek that is both cumbersome and, incontext, irrelevant. What is required, and isprovided in the Introduction, is a survey ofthe literary genre of the exhortation to thearts, and an appreciation of the epideicticskills of a Roman intellectual. One minorpoint: on p. 53, n. 117, it is the death of theStrasbourg, not the British, Adelphus that isreported in 1555, so Mme Boudon'sobjection to the identification of the ownerof the Codex Adelphi with John Friar,d. 1563, fails.By contrast, the edition of the Art ofmedicine is a tour de force ofpatient labouracross several languages and cultures. Galenintended this treatise as the quintessence ofhis medical ideas, and it became, from atleast the sixth century onwards, the moststudied text of all those in the GalenicCorpus. In order to establish a Greek text,Mme Boudon has had to investigateversions, abridgments and commentaries inSyriac, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, to saynothing of forty Greek manuscriptscontaining this text in whole or in part. Forsheer complexity, only Alexanderson'sedition of Crises bears comparison, and thedetails ofmanuscript readings in theapparatus and the commentary mask theextent of the work that has had to be done.Mme Boudon throws light on the ways inwhich this Galenic text was interpreted overthe centuries, down to the Renaissance,and, for the first time ever, scholars have asound textual basis for their arguments.Mme Boudon shows how the recent doubtson the authenticity of this treatise can nowbe set at rest because they were the result ofa defective transmission of Galen's words.The translation is scrupulous, the noteshighly informative, and the introductionand running commentary explain just howGalen structures this book on logicalgrounds to accord with his "method ofteaching" announced in his opening words.The book itselfis tightly organized with agenerally clear sequence ofthought. Thereare no longeurs-or entertaining stories-and one can see why, to get proper benefitfrom it, the ancient or medieval readerneeded the help of a teacher to expound allthat might be intended in a few crispGalenic lines. If, at times, one feelsoppressed by Galen's taut sequences, one isalso brought to appreciate just how well hemanaged to encapsulate his clinicaldoctrines in a single long book.Whereas with the Protrepticus the basicspadework had already been done, thisedition of the Art is real pioneering stuff.What is remarkable is the sane judgementwith which Mme Boudon has picked herway through Arabic glosses and Byzantinemistakes to give a text that carriesconviction. That I am not entirelypersuaded by her decisions at 370,17 and387,8 also shows how cogent are her otherchoices. Similarly, the few comments thatfollow represent amplifications, notcorrections. Page 309, Quod animi morescould have been written after the Art, andhence "dej'" is wrong. Pages 389 and 443, asurvey of what appears to be the Arabicversion of Dissection ofdead bodies waspublished by M Ormos in the proceedingsof the 1989 Galen conference. Page 191,Budge's belief that the Syriac book ofmedicine was itself translated from the561Book ReviewsGreek is here followed, despite Schleifer'sdemonstration that its "Greekness" derivedfrom its incorporation oflarge chunks ofGalen in Syriac translation. Misprints areamazingly few, and none should causeproblems, except perhaps for page 169,n. 48, read "Vasquez Bujan", and for theuncoordinated placing of (3) on page 331.All those concerned in the production ofthis book deserve the heartiest ofcongratulations. Whether one is interestedin Galen as a writer of Greek and a literaryfigure or as a medical guru in his own dayand across the centuries, this edition offersa magnificent starting point for furtherresearch.Vivian Nutton,The Wellcome Trust Centre for the Historyof Medicine at UCLMark Grant, Galen onfood and diet,London and New York, Routledge, 2000,pp. ix, 214, illus., £15.99 (paperback 0415-23233-3).This new selection of translations fromGalen arouses mixed feelings in thiscurmudgeonly reviewer: gratitude for theaccessibility of some of the more interestingtexts in the Galenic Corpus, constantirritation at the many minor errors andmisunderstandings. Mark Grant, anexperienced cook as well as a classicsteacher, has chosen to turn into English avariety of treatises relating to diet, in boththe narrow sense of foodstuffs and thewider one of bodily constitution. On thepowers (better, properties?) offoods is filledwith fascinating glimpses of life in thecountryside of ancient Greece, and showsGalen's great skill as an observer and anexpositor. None of these treatises haspreviously been available in English, andthe translator can only be congratulated,not least on the felicitous way in whichGalen's rebarbative Greek has been turnedinto something more elegant. His experiencewith other ancient texts to do with foodsand cookery gives his identifications of thenames of plants authority.But there are also many mistakes, someof them serious. On pages 70-3, forexample, at 6.458 K. (alas, no references aregiven to enable those with Greek to cross-check easily), Grant fails to note anessential comparative: "there are evenpeople who can digest beef easier than rockfish" (for Galen, the most digestible of all).At 459 K., technicalities are misunderstood:read, "bile which should flow to the bowelsfrom the liver goes back up to the belly".At 461, pronouns are misunderstood; read,"everything boiled in water takes somethingfrom it [the water] and in return contributessomething of its own property". Theomission of a phrase at the top of 465 thenmakes nonsense of Galen's careful claimthat our digestive processes may be affectedby our natural constitution, an acquiredcondition of the stomach, or the essentialnature of the food that is being digested.Similar slips can be found throughout, to bedetected only by very close reading and thebelief that Galen did not write logicalnonsense.Other problems arise from Grant'sdecision to follow the old text of Kuhninstead of a more modern edition. It is truethat many errors in Kuhn have little effecton the sense, but sometimes they do. So, at515 K., the list of Bithynian cities is badlygarbled in Kuhn, and could have beeneasily corrected from Helmreich's 1924CMG edition-or from a glance at any mapof the region in Antiquity. At 518 K.mistranslation hides a point of crucialimportance: the peasants of Upper Mysiaalways use einkorn and rice-wheat for theirbread because their wheat is taken away tothe cities (elsewhere Galen notes, undercompulsion).Despite what is said, on page 2, Galennever studied at Corinth; on page 3, thesejourneys are very unlikely to have beenmade in 161 (better, 166-7), and I would562

Galen, Galien. Tome II: Exhortation à l'étude de la médecine. Art médical, ed. and trans. Veronique Boudon, Collection des Universites de France, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000, pp. 454, Fr400 (hardback 2-251-00483-1).

Galen, Galien. Tome II: Exhortation à l'étude de la médecine. Art médical, ed. and trans. Veronique Boudon, Collection des Universites de France, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000, pp. 454, Fr400 (hardback 2-251-00483-1).

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