De Plenitudine (review)

The brief treatise under review here is hardly to be numbered among the major works of Galen, but it does possess a certain interest of its own. The deceptively simple title, Peri plethous—or De plenitudine, as it is often referred to in Latin, Über die Fülle in Dr. Otte's edition, or, in plain English, "On Fullness"—conceals the fact that a very technical kind of "fullness" or "repletion" is the subject dealt with in this medical/philosophical/logical essay. (One must not forget that medicine, if the sharpest, is not the only arrow in Galen's remarkable quiver.) What, then, is the "plethos" of Galen's title? The reference is to various harmful superfluities, of differing compositions in different cases, found occurring (according to Galen) in a wide variety of bodily "parts" including flesh and skin, arteries and veins, internal organs, and bones. As one would expect, the four humors make more than one appearance here. (Those who would smile at such theories might keep in mind, on the one hand, that Galen was working without knowledge of the circulation of the blood or of modern chemistry, and on the other, that, to take one example, Sir Christopher Wren [1632-1723], more than two millennia after the first appearance of the "humors," still thought it worthwhile to experiment on dogs by removing their spleens in order to observe whether or not they still produced black bile.)

The chief purpose of this treatise of Galen's is to refute earlier competing theories and to provide, once and for all, an etiology for such symptoms and conditions. Here, as so often in his other works, he takes considerable pleasure in dismissing any and all medical rivals, past or present, and so doing in a lively and colloquial style quite alien to the impersonal tone of most modern scientific works. This is the vain Galen at his most endearing and human, and it lends the piece a certain charm. Equally important, or more so, is the fact that he takes on adversaries who were great in their own right and often quotes them verbatim, thus preserving excerpts from works long since lost. Chief among his targets here are the truly important Hellenistic doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus, whose writings have not survived. At other times, in lieu of providing a detailed account of his views, he confines himself to referring the reader to other, larger works of his own.

This new edition is a slightly revised doctoral dissertation; it passes muster as a solid and valuable piece of scholarship. Dr. Otte has carefully collated (so far as I can judge without autopsy) and evaluated the manuscripts that preserve the treatise, studied with profit the Latin versions of the Renaissance (there are no medieval Latin translations), and made full use of the relevant secondary literature. The Greek text is, on the whole, reliable; there are a few passages where I believe Otte to have printed the wrong choices (I may discuss these elsewhere), but such occasional disagreements are only to be expected. Facing the Greek text is a German translation of an admirable clarity (there is still no English translation of the entire work in existence). Particularly helpful are the explanatory additions inserted in the translation (always enclosed in parentheses to indicate that these are not Galen's own words). Since Galen sometimes writes hurriedly and in a certain elliptical manner, this practice has the effect of making the translation a sort of minicommentary. There follow a Paraphrase—that is, a concise summary of the contents, chapter by chapter—and then a collection of selected notes dealing both with the Greek text and with the medical content. Indices, bibliography, and photographs of specimen pages from the Greek manuscripts conclude the work. The chief...