Text and Tradition: Studies in Ancient Medicine and Its Transmission: Presented to Jutta Kollesch (review)

As befits the subject of this festschrift—Dr. Jutta Harig-Kollesch (former head of the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum [CMG] and Corpus Medicorum Latinorum at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday—the assembled essays are, with one exception, contributions to the classical scholarship of medical texts and their transmission, with the Galenic corpus naturally assuming center stage. As the preface points out, most (though notably not all) of the contributors are past or present editors of the CMG series.

Beate Gundert's article clearly marks the high point of the book: an extraordinarily lucid, learned, and detailed study of the Tabulae Vindobonenses, schematic versions of ten Galenic texts. An introduction outlining the subject and the problems it poses is followed by sections on the transmission, structure, organization, and syntax of the tables. Gundert provides a brilliant analysis of the connections between the Tabulae and the Byzantine-Alexandrian tradition, in the course of which, on the basis of a comparison between the Tabulae and the surviving Alexandrian commentaries on Galen, she is able to show that in both cases the Galenic text underwent conceptual exegesis, supplementation, interpretation, and systematization. Those Galenic treatises for which no Alexandrian commentaries survive are compared instead with Stephanus's commentary on the Aphorisms, with the Galenic scholia of cod. Yalensis 234, and with the Alexandrian divisions of medicine. Here, too, the author highlights some striking parallels. The organization of the material in the schematic versions of the Tabulae nevertheless differs markedly from that of the commentary tradition, at times showing a closer adherence to, and greater familiarity with, the Galenic text. Gundert's concluding remarks also present us with a more precise idea of the date (between A.D. 550 and 650) and function of the Tabulae, which were probably used as Alexandrian teaching tools.

Paul Potter sheds light on the relationship between the Aldine editions of Hippocrates (HA) and Galen (GA), paying particular attention to the production of On Joints,On the Office of the Physician, and On Fractures texts in HA and the corresponding commentaries in GA. On the basis of his knowledge of the manuscript tradition of both Hippocratic and Galenic texts and his erudite comparison of the two Aldines in particular, he arrives at the following conclusions: In preparing the printed edition of Galen's commentary on Prorrhetics I, the editors encountered inconsistencies between the MS tradition of Hippocrates and that of Galen in cases where Galen is quoting lemmata from the Hippocratic text; hence, they opted to rely on the MS tradition of Galen for the remaining texts—including the reconstruction of the Hippocratic texts that Galen is quoting. They thus produced, as a preliminary to the printed version, a now lost text; on the basis of this version, both the Hippocratic treatises and the corresponding Galenic commentaries could be edited. The parallel tasks of editing HA and GA/5 thus came together in the final phase. In support of his findings, Potter cites the letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam, which further attest to the fact that the five volumes of GA could not have been completed and published before April 1526. The publisher's mark and Asulanus's preface to GA/5 even suggest that the title page of GA had been printed at a later date than that of HA. In view of these findings, common assumptions that date publication to 1525 need to be revised.

Klaus-Dietrich Fischer addresses the pseudo-Soranic Quaestiones medicinales. In a beautifully structured argument, he builds a bridge from the present state of research, the three more or less well preserved sources for the text, and the interrelations between...