Il cervello secondo Galeno (review)

Tullio Manzoni's book reads well and is a nice synthesis of Galen's views on neurophysiology. The author does not present new material, nor does he revise the communis opinio. Rather, he plumbs Galen's imposing corpus with Rudolph Siegel's, Luis García Ballester's, John Scarborough's, and Vivian Nutton's classic studies. Perhaps the novelty of Manzoni's contribution lies in his approach: he presents the interesting experiment of writing about history starting from the assumption that, if we know the real structures and functions of the body, then we can judge correctly what is true and what is false in past knowledge concerning the body. He performs the trick of making sense out of what appear to our modern eyes as incongruities and oddities by showing that the ancients did not have a clear idea of what they were doing. His essay is an attempt to translate Galen's antique views into the language of contemporary neurophysiology; indeed, he sometimes seems to take great pleasure in rewriting entire sections of Galen's anatomy. The result may seem smooth, comforting, and reassuring, but, in writing the otherness of the past out of history, Manzoni proves to be an unreliable translator. All translation is already an act of interpretation and understanding—never a simple transliteration, and certainly not an updating of the past in the light of the present. Writing of the past in the present is a delicate business, for if it is honest to say that the present informs our understanding of the past, it is just as true that the past illumines the present.

The following are some examples of Manzoni's hermeneutic. He believes that Erasistratus's understanding of the brain was on the right track, but that Galen's rejection of Erasistratus was responsible for the failure of anatomists to make good the promise of that understanding. As Manzoni puts it, "Galen's acrimonious voice got in the way" (p. 94). He believes further that the silencing of Erasistratus was effected by a Galenic tradition that was in large part based on Galen's own manufacture of logically consistent, experimentally plausible, and methodologically sophisticated arguments, and on his doctoring or omission of experimental results—thus ignoring the fact that much of the potency of the Galenic tradition derived not from the contrivance of one man, but from the creativity and intelligence of its various receptions. It is ironic that Manzoni credits Galen with a great "experience and culture" (p. 35) and then suspects him of falsifying some results that Manzoni himself has not been able to reproduce, like the experiments on heart extirpation from living animals. Similarly, he writes that Galen "did not take into consideration or ignored on purpose the evidence that the rete mirabilis does not exist in the monkey" (p. 45). Further, he doubts that "Galen was honest when he claimed he could see the pores within the optic nerves" (p. 54). "No blind man is worse than the man who does not want to see" (p. 89), Manzoni lectures. By questioning Galen's honesty, he transforms historical reconstruction into the unveiling of what he takes to be Galen's grandiose plot against anatomy's magnifiche sorti e progressive.

Manzoni is a professor of physiology at the University of Ancona (Italy), and his being a practicing physiologist may go some way toward explaining his concern to modernize Galen and his embarrassment at catching Galen in error. Studies of history of medicine certainly owe a great deal to professional physicians who have devoted themselves to historical studies; within Italy, it suffices to mention Salvatore de Renzi and Luigi Amabile. Scientific competence, nevertheless, is not in itself historical competence. Indeed, it is sometimes the case that technical sophistication and modern specialization impede rather than aid historical interpretation.