Before we begin: The Prefaces to Books 6–11 of Galen’s Simple Drugs
A Snake by Maria Sibylla Merian. Held at The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Image via the Harvard Art Museums Collections Online. Originally found as the frontispiece for this article by Johnathan Hay.
Until recently, Galen’s works on drugs had not received much attention, and this makes some sense. They don’t have critical editions, which in some circles is reason enough to avoid them. They are long and can make for pretty dull reading (although less so than much of Galen’s other writings). And they had not been translated into modern languages.
Luckily, this is changing. Caterina Manco recently completed a partial edition and French translation of Simples 6–8. And John Wilkin’s English translation and comments on Simples 1–5 with the Cambridge Galen Translations is on the way. And while there still remain the other books of Simples and the massive works on Composition of Drugs left to do, teams are working hard on these as well.
As editions and translations begin to make the work more widely available, I think there are two major hurdles for anyone starting to get into Galen’s pharmacology. First, Galen’s Greek is technical: the books contain obscure jargon from early Imperial medicine and philosophy and hard-to-identify terms for botanical, mineral and animal substances. Students and researchers also lack commentary and interpretive work, so even with a translation, it would be hard to dive in. Second is a lack of context. Galen’s works on drugs are a self-conscious attempt to rethink the discipline of pharmacology and he emphasises over and over again how different what he is doing is from earlier works. This means, in the first place, that we need to keep in mind what Galen thinks he is doing, which he describes in books 1 to 5; but, it also means that we need to know what other options were available to him in order to understand what his motivations were, and unfortunately, we don’t have many of the sources he’s responding to. We have Dioscorides, and some Pseudo-Dioscorides, Scribonius Largus and perhaps some Philumenus; but we lack the works of Asclepiades, Sextius Niger, Mantias, Pamphilus, Xenocrates, and those from the circles of Archigenes and Philipp, never mind Heracleides of Tarentum, Apollonius Mys, Cleopatra the Physician, and many others. Fragments exist in Oribasius and Aetius, but in those works they are stripped of their context, which means lots of extra work for any scholar trying to reconstruct Galen’s.
This situation is changing and will change more very soon. Caroline Petit, who is editing the entire Simples, has important articles on many aspects of Galen’s engagement with his predecessors (I will cite some as I go). Manuela Marai is working on experimental replications of ointments in Galen’s work on compound drugs. Simone Mucci is working on Galen’s Antidosis. Matteo Martelli and Lucia Raggetti have been working on the text, transmission, reception, and metamorphoses, particularly Book IX of Simples. Alessia Guardasole is editing Compound Drugs according to Places for the CUF. Laurence Totelin has published on pharmacology, cosmetics, remedies and trade in Galenic and related contexts. Veronique Boudon and Françoise Micheau have recently edited a volume on theriac. Eric Gowling completed a study, translation and commentary on the herbal portion of Aetius, book one of the Medical Books. Maximilian Haars’ work on Oribasius’ Book XV of the Medical Collections is as much a commentary on Galenic pharmacology as on Oribasius. Ianto Jocks just finished a wonderful study with translation and commentary on Scribonius Largus’ Compound Drugs. Maciej Kokoszko, Zofia Rzeźnicka, Krzysztof Jagusiak, and others at Łódź University’s Ceraneum Centre are publishing regularly on pharmacology and related topics, in addition to holding an annual colloquium highlighting work in the field. Finally, Philip van der Eijk’s classic paper on qualified experience is important for getting into the epistemological motivations for Galen’s project, and similar starting points are Barnes’ “Logic and Therapy” and much of Jim Hankinson’s work. There’s much more, but writing it all out would be a review article.
As I’ve been working through the pharmacology, it was helpful for me to have some working translations of the theoretical prefaces to Simples 6–11. These are places where Galen summarizes what he’s done, explains what he is about to do, and adds succinct details about his project that help to contextualize the project of Simples in relation to the rest of Galen’s work. Some of the prefaces have been translated by others and published in bits and pieces here and there, but not in their entirety. So, for the rest of the summer, on Monday mornings I’ll be posting my translations of them here, starting with the preface to Book 6.