McVAUGH Lost Galen
McVAUGH Lost Galen
McVAUGH Lost Galen
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Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement
MICHAEL McVAUGH
My title promises more than it can possibly deliver. The lost Latin Galen' wo
enormous range, after all. When a medieval Latin author of the thirteenth to t
century introduces a passage with the bare phrase 'ut dicit Galienus,' that un
quotation can effectively be said to be 'lost,' though the Galenic original might
we knew where to look. When a Latin author refers to a passage from a lost Galen
De demonstratione , we are certainly entitled at least to wonder, wistfully, wh
version once existed and has now disappeared. And, of course, sometimes an aut
explicit reference to a Latin translation of a Galenic work, a translation which nev
cannot identify with any Latin text surviving today. In all these cases we can presu
was some kind of original Galenic source that is now hidden from us - and th
course, that we are referring to a Galen that has been 'lost' only in a weak sens
each instance we have a hint of its existence. The complete 'lost Latin Galen' w
include unattributed passages that we no longer suspect originated in his wr
translations that were once made and then disappeared without a trace - this G
inescapably hidden from us and is 'lost' in what you might call the strong sense
It is not entirely fanciful to imagine that Latin translations of Galenic work
been made and then been lost in this strong sense, leaving no record whatsoever
of this emerges from the Conciliator of Pietro d'Abano, a work (completed abo
attempts to mediate a large number of medico-philosophical controversies of t
Pietro refers to, and indeed quotes from, his own translations from Greek into
or so Galenic works: De utilitate particularium ; De regimine sanitads; De
credcorum; De anatomia ; Liber prognosdcorum; De optima compositions, De
sphera parva; and so on. Most of these translations no longer appear to exist in
copies. To be sure, Pietro's translation of De colera nigra is well known; Rich
identified three copies of what may be Pietro's translation of De optima comp
Durling also found what may be Pietro's translations of De bono corporis hab
exercido } However, the rest of the translations that Pietro referred to are appare
only know about these Latin translations because Pietro happened to mention t
Conciliator , and it is perfectly possible that he made translations of still other G
even more deeply lost, which he did not have reason to refer to there.
All this is to explain why this paper cannot presume to be comprehensive. I w
many of these kinds of loss in passing, but I will focus on a particular case, the di
i Richard Durling, 'Corrigenda and Addenda to Diels' Galenica. I', Traditio 23 (1967), 468; idem,
Addenda to Diels' Galenica. n' Traditio 37 (1981), 374, 378.
The Methodus medendi (the Therapeutic method or Method of healing) has a claim to being
the most important of Galen's many works - not simply because of its great length, more than
a thousand pages in Kiihn's edition of 1825, but for its scope (quoting Vivian Nutton) as 'the
most sustained account of Galen's attitude towards medical theory and practice, embracing
not only a whole range of varied diseases but also the philosophical arguments and
presuppositions that in Galen's view should govern the doctor's therapeutic activities.'2 To
medieval medical practitioners it was further memorable because it presented a number of
case histories, vignettes of Galen's encounters with individual patients; to medieval surgeons
it was especially significant because its earlier books had so much to say about Galen's
surgical practice.
The way in which the Methodus medendi was composed by Galen is curious: it was written
in two bursts twenty years apart, a gap that had its consequences for the work's content.
Nutton has concluded that books I- VI, containing so much of the philosophical polemic and
the surgical material, were probably written in the mid-170s; the book was set aside when the
friend to whom the work was originally dedicated died, and only in the late 190s did Galen
come back to it and complete books VII-XIV (which make much greater use of the case
history as an aid to teaching).3 Nutton has also suggested cautiously that the two halves of the
work can be used to understand the progress of Galen's own career: in the second half,
twenty years later, he seems more confident of his position, more intolerant of his wealthy
patients' vagaries - more at home in Rome, perhaps.4
Probably not coincidentally, these two distinct parts of the work - the first six and the last
eight books, which from now on I will call Part I and Part II - had different histories as they
passed from Greek through Syriac into Arabic, as we learn from Hunain ibn Ishaq in the ninth
century. A Syriac translation had been made in the sixth century that Hunain found very
unsatisfactory: Part I was, he thought, virtually unusable in that translation, but Part II he
tried to touch up by referring to a copy of the Greek text before deciding that he really might
as well make a new translation. Unfortunately the only copy of this second translation of Part
II was burned shortly afterwards; some years later, therefore, Hunain set about preparing a
full Syriac translation of both Parts I and II. For Part I he could find only a single corrupt
manuscript in Greek to work from, and he believed that this scarcity of Greek copies was due
to the fact that (perhaps because of its focus on surgical matters) this portion of the work had
not been an important element in the medical curriculum in the schools of late Alexandria.
2 Vivian Nutton, 'Style and Context in the Method of Healing', in Fridolf Kudlien and Richard J. Durling, eds, Galen's
Method of Healing (Leiden 1991) 1.
3 Ibid., 2-4.
4 Ibid., 21-25.
For Part II, on the other hand, he had several Greek manuscripts
was based on their best reading. It was from this new Syriac text t
century, Hunain's colleagues at Baghdad finally prepared an Ar
himself checked over the finished version of Part II. In contrast
text, Part I was perhaps more popular in Islam than Part II, at lea
survival of manuscript material.5
Parts I and II of the Methodus Medendi also had different histor
Latin. The first Latin version of the work was made from the
African in Southern Italy in the late eleventh century; this text, w
of Megategni , is a sharply abbreviated paraphrase of both Part
Twelfth-century scholars were unhappy with Constantine's failure
as they saw it, and some felt that his work needed to be redone. Tw
Methodus medendi were made during that century: Gerard of Cre
the entire work from Arabic under the title De ingenio sanitatis
Italy, translated only Part II from Greek under the title Terapeut
'therapeutikes methodos'); apparently Burgundio, like Hunain b
finding a Greek text of Part I to work from. Burgundio als
untranslated, stopping in the middle of book XIV, and a transl
conclusion was first prepared at the beginning of the fourteenth
- although, of course, it could always have been read in Gerard's
There may have been a sense among some early medical readers t
of Part II was to be preferred, because many manuscripts of the
Part I in Gerard's translation but have suppressed his Part II in fa
(with its completion by Pietro) - perhaps just as many as surviv
translation of Parts I and II.7
II
5 On this see Ursula Weisser, 'Zur Rezeption der Methodus medendi im Continens des Rhazes', in Kudlien and
Durling, Galen's Method , 123-29; G. Bergsträsser, Hunain ibn Ishaq über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-
Übersetzungen (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, XVII, no. 2) (Leipzig 1925), #20, pp. 14-15; Fuat
Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums , vol. 3 (Leiden 1970), 98.
6 According to Pearl Kibre, 'A List of Latin Manuscripts Containing Medieval Versions of the Methodus Medendi ',
revised by R. J. Durling, in Kudlien and Durling, Galen's Method, 121, Pietro' s contribution begins with the chapter
that opens 'Duplex autem est et hoc genus unum quidem . . . ,' which is chapter 12 of the 19 chapters into which the
text is divided in Galen, Opera, 2 vols, (Venice, 1490), 2.219ra.
7 Thus Durling ('Corrigenda I', 474-75) found equal numbers of the two versions among Vatican manuscripts of the
work - the composite translation is also that printed in the Venice, 1490, edition of Galen's collected works referred
to in n. 6.
Now in fact Guy took conscious satisfaction from the fact that he had had access to works
of Galen that virtually no Latin physician before him had been able to consult, and that in the
case of some Galenic works he had been able to read them in recent translations made
directly from Greek rather than from Arabic. He was among the earliest medieval medical
writers to express an explicit and deliberate preference for translations from Greek. The
medical schools of Bologna and Montpellier at the beginning of the fourteenth century had
begun to take a new interest in Galen's own writings, but with one exception these were
known in translation from either Arabic or Greek: only De interioribus then existed in both
an Arabic-Latin and a Greek-Latin version. In the 1290s these versions of De interioribus
(that is, De locis affectis) were of enough interest to Taddeo Alderotti in Bologna that he
compared the two systematically, making marginal notes to indicate which translation seemed
preferable - but Taddeo's project was unique for his time.8
What had altered the situation by Guy de Chauliac's day was the astonishing productivity
of a translator in Southern Italy, Niccolò da Reggio. Niccolò' s achievement was made
possible by the patronage of the Angevin king of Naples, Robert I, for the Angevin library
was rich in Greek manuscripts - particularly, it would seem, ones on medicine; this was a
subject that had been of special interest to Charles I and was equally so to Robert, who
obsessively sent agents out into Southern Italy to search for Greek manuscripts to enlarge his
collection. These rulers also commissioned a number of individuals to make Latin
translations of the Greek texts in their collection, but the only one from whom an appreciabl
number of translations has survived is Niccolò da Reggio, who specialized in translating the
works of Galen. The catalogue drawn up by Lynn Thorndike in 1946 listed fifty-six Galeni
works that Niccolò rendered into Latin; not all his translations are dated, but those that are
8 Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton 1981
101-02.
fall between the years 1308 and 1345. 9 The exceptional richnes
he worked can be judged from the fact that eight of the works N
are today no longer available in that language.10 Much of the A
the Hungarian invasion of 1347-48, and a large portion of that (
Greek manuscripts) was lost by shipwreck in the Adriatic on th
not surprising that most later medieval Latin readers remained
of the works he translated.
The fact that no works from the other Angevin translators are known to survive suggested
to Robert Weiss that perhaps only one transcript was made of each version, namely the one
deposited in the Royal Library, and that these unique copies perished with that priceless
collection.'11 Whether or not that is so, Niccolò's translations became known to the West
because he sent a copy of at least a portion of his oeuvre to the papal library at Avignon,
where Guy de Chauliac was able to consult it.12 But there are signs that even Guy did not
have access to Niccolò's complete output. For example, he refers to one Galenic work as De
motibus liquidis , the title of its Arabic-Latin translation, not as De motibus dubiis , the title
given it in Niccolò's retranslation.13 Again, of Niccolò's fifty-odd translations, Guy refers to
only fifteen or so,14 including (among those that Niccolò dated) De usu partium (translated
in 1317) and the Miamir (also known as De passionibus uniuscuiusque particule , translated
in 1335), but not others dated 1341 and 1345. So it is conceivable that when Guy came to
Avignon in the mid-1340s he found there a collection of Niccolò's earlier translations that
had been compiled and given to the papal court in the late 1330s. In any case, Francesco
LoParco's suggestion that Niccolò could have presented a copy of his translations to Pope
John XXII in 1322 when he came to Avignon in King Robert's entourage is not enough to
explain all Guy's quotations.15 For the moment, let us conclude simply that Niccolò tried to
give some circulation to his translations but that, despite his efforts, they did not circulate
widely; Guy de Chauliac is one of the very few fourteenth-century medical authors who can
be shown to have made use of them.
Guy valued Niccolò's works because, as he declared, they were 'alcioris et perfeccioris stili
. . . quam translati de arabica lingua.'16 He could make such a comparison because Niccolò
had retranslated from Greek at least two Galenic works that were already available in
translations from Arabic: Galen's commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms , where Niccolò's
completion of a Greek-Latin version begun by Burgundio of Pisa could be compared with
the Arabic-Latin translation apparently drawn up by Constantine the African; and Galen's De
9 Lynn Thorndike, Translations of Works of Galen from the Greek by Niccolò da Reggio (c. 1308-1345)', Byzantina
Metabyzantina 1 (1946) 213-35.
10 Vivian Nutton, John Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen (Cambridge 1987), 30 n. 7.
il Robert Weiss, The Translators from the Greek of the Angevin Court of Naples', Rinascimento 1 (1950) 215.
12 Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia Magna , ed. Michael R. McVaugh, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Leiden 1997) 7.
13 Suggested by Margaret S. Ogden, The Galenic Works Cited in Guy de Chauliac' s Chirurgia Magna', Journal of
the History of Medicine 28 (1973) 31 n. 20.
14 The complete list is given in ibid., 28-33.
15 Francesco LoParco, 'Niccolò da Reggio antesignano del Risorgimento dell' antichità elleniche nel secolo XIV', Atti
della Reale Accademia di archeologia, lettere e belle arti di Napoli , n.s. 2(1910) 262.
16 Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium (ed. McVaugh), capitulum singulare, p. 7.
Ill
Where might Guy have come upon this translation? Who could have
has it disappeared? The second of these questions, at least, seems to h
that this is one of the lost translations from the Greek that Pietro d'Abano claimed to have
prepared. We have already encountered Pietro as a self-proclaimed translator of Galen, the
man who completed Burgundio's Greek-Latin translation of book XIV of the Methodus
medendi , but there is a case to be made for his having done much more than this, depending
on how we interpret his reference in the Conciliator to a passage 'in principio . . .
terapeutices artis [that is, the Methodus medendi ] sicut transtuli. '23 Lynn Thorndike supposed
from this that Pietro not only finished book XIV for Burgundio but was here revealing that
he had also prepared a Greek-Latin version of books I- VI, thus completing Burgundio's
translation at the beginning as well as at the end.24 And since the passage that Pietro proceeds
to quote seems to correspond very closely to a passage that Guy happens to quote from book
I, and since both are very different from the standard Arabic-Latin translation of the same
passage, it might seem highly probable that our lost translation of the Methodus medendi had
been composed by Pietro d'Abano, sometime before 13 10.25
But in fact things are not this simple. As it happens, Pietro quotes the Methodus medendi not
just this once in the Conciliator but something like forty times. He refers to the work under
three titles: 'De ingenio sanitatis,' 'Terapeutice ars,' and 'Curative ars.' And whatever the title,
with the one exception of the passage I have just referred to, every time he quotes the work he
is demonstrably referring to the composite version that circulated widely in his day,
comprising Part I in the Arabic-Latin translation and Part II in the Greek-Latin translation. The
version that always leapt to his pen, the definitive version to his mind, was - with that one
exception - the traditional version of Gerard and Burgundio.
How can we explain this? I believe that Pietro' s reference to his 'translation' refers not to
a translation of the complete work but to one of this passage only - that at this particular point,
he chose to consult a Greek manuscript to which he had access and to translate these few words
into Latin because he was dissatisfied with the Arabic-Latin version. If we look at his
translation of this phrase and compare it closely with that given in Guy's encyclopedia, we find
small but significant differences: Pietro translates 'ôéovrai' as 'indigent,' Guy as 'egerent,'
for example.26 1 suggest that the resemblance between the two passages is merely coincidental,
a product of the simple and relatively unequivocal phraseology of the Greek being quoted, and
23 On the date, see Lynn Thorndike, 'Translations of Works of Galen from the Greek by Peter of Abano', Isis 33
(1942) 649 n. 1. Following Thorndike (650 n. 13), I have quoted Pietro as saying 'transtuli' ('I translated'), although
the printed editions all say 'transtuliť ('he translated'). Thorndike goes on (p. 651) to suggest that the Therapeutica
ars is the same work as the De regimine sanitatis to which Pietro refers at least twice - 'De regimine sanitatis de verbo
ad verbum'; 'de regimine sanitatis primo' - but De regimine sanitatis is the name by which De sanitate tuenda was
already known, and Pietro's references are actually to that work (see the following paragraph).
IV
Finally, we need to assume that those six books were little copied by later scribes and
hence did not manage to survive, and this is not entirely far-fetched either. By Niccolò's day
(the mid-fourteenth century) the language of the older Arabic-Latin versions was so well
entrenched in university curricula that masters seem to have preferred not to cope with the
newer translations. This is the case, for example, with Galen's commentary on the Aphorisms :
Pearl Kibre has identified 76 fourteenth- or fifteenth-century copies of its translation by
Constantine the African, but only 10 of the translation begun (apparently) by Burgundio of
Pisa and completed by Niccolò early in his career, in 1314.28 Moreover, the prominence
given to surgery in Part I of the Methodus medendi made it of relatively little importance to
many medical faculties in the later Middle Ages, especially as surgery was becoming more
and more a nonacademic craft in many parts of Europe. It is still remarkable, but not perhaps
astonishing, that - assuming with me that it once did exist - a translation by Niccolò of Part
I of the Methodus medendi should not have survived.
So there is my reconstruction: my fragments reveal a Methodus medendi that was among the
Galenic works translated from Greek by Niccolò da Reggio and sent to Avignon, but that,
perhaps because of its narrowly surgical focus, could not compete successfully with the
traditional Arabic-Latin version of Gerard of Cremona. If any copies were made, they were
too few to allow it to survive, and it was lost. And yet now of course it is not quite lost,
because it has left its imprint in Guy de Chauliac's Inventarium. As I discovered more and
more citations to Part I in that work, I found myself intrigued by the problem of
reconstructing the text he had used, which was in the end relatively straightforward: it was
no great task to assemble the citations and to put them in order by comparing them with
Kühn's Greek text. Guy incorporated only seven passages from the first two books, which
are concerned more with abstract methodology than with the details of practice, but he quoted
much more extensively from the later books with their surgical detail: 65 times from book
VI, and 48 times from book IV. The citations are often brief, but not infrequently he quotes
a sentence or two in full; and, once, a combination of quotations from Guy's text corresponds
to nearly two consecutive pages in Kühn.29 A partial reconstruction of the text of the vanished
translation is thus certainly possible.
In the Appendix to this paper (pp. 163-64 below), I have supplied the longest of these Latin
fragments, with the corresponding Greek. Some day, perhaps, these and the other passages
quoted by Guy may help reconstruct the Greek textual tradition. More interestingly from my
perspective, they may eventually make it possible to decide whether my hypothesis about
Niccolò da Reggio as the author of the lost translation is correct. In the last twenty years or
so scholars have begun the process of analyzing different individuals' styles of translation
28 Pearl Kibre, Hippocrates Latinus (New York, 1985), comparing copies listed on pp. 55-61 and 61-62. On the
proposed date, see Thorndike, Translations by Niccolò da Reggio', 219.
29 The Greek text in K 10.238-40 corresponds to the Latin in Inventarium IV. 1.1 (ed. McVaugh), 213 lines 34-39 and
212 lines 3-22; see the Appendix below, pp. 163-64.
APPENDIX
B Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium IV. 1.1 (ed. McVaugh, pp. 213, 212)