Il calderone di Medea: la sperimentazione sul vivente nell'Antichita, and: Le corps respirant: la pensée physiologique chez Galien (review)

M. D. Grmek’s short book on biological experimentation in the ancient world is based on lectures he delivered at the University of Padua in 1996. In Il calderone di Medea, he expands upon themes he introduced in the essay “L’expérimentation biologique quantitative dans l’Antiquité,” published in La première révolution biologique (1990). In that essay, he discussed five stages of experimental investigation, beginning with “unsophisticated experimental groping,” and progressing through elementary or analogical reasoning, quantitative experiments, and scientific empiricism to the modern model of systematic experimentation. In Il calderone di Medea he extends this concept to twelve stages, in which twentieth-century experimentation occupies the ultimate level—a categorization that Grmek admits can be only temporary as methods continue to evolve.

While this schematization implies an inevitable progress, it nonetheless works surprisingly well as a heuristic device in explaining ancient methods, which often cannot be defined as “experimental” in the modern sense. As his subtitle indicates, Grmek’s concern is not with experimentation in general, but with the special category of experimentation on living beings, both human and animal. His examples are striking. One is a story told by Herodotus of the Egyptian pharaoh who, in an attempt to determine the most ancient race of humans, caused some infants to be raised in silence, believing that whatever word they first uttered would be in the most primitive language. According to Grmek, this follows a rather sophisticated experimental model, which includes a hypothesis and a controlled situation. More primitive “trial and error” methods appear in the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine. In the Hippocratic treatises, Grmek also finds evidence of what he terms more advanced methods, including close observation and analogical reasoning.

According to Grmek, Aristotle, while a superlative observer, did not really perform experiments. Syllogistic logic precluded the existence of a hypothetico-deductive method, and Aristotle did not believe that nature would give up its inner secrets. Even the Alexandrians Herophilus and Erasistratus do not, in Grmek’s view, qualify as true experimenters. He uses Erasistratus’s discussion of the function of the pulse to point out the flaws in his epistemology. Only Galen in antiquity combined a rationalist, realist philosophy with superlative technique to gain truly experimental knowledge.

While Grmek’s interpretive schema may seem too rigid to some, this little book is packed with insights and examples that demonstrate the author’s mastery of the materials. Even those who disagree with some aspects of the argument will find plenty to think about.

While Grmek cuts a wide swath through ancient history, Armelle Debru, who studied with him, delves deeply into a single subject: Galen’s discussion of respiration. The breath, says Debru, signified life to the ancients, and therefore to study respiration was to study the nature of life. Her study has several dimensions. As one might expect, Galen’s theories of respiration and his anatomical and physiological studies of it occupy a major portion of the book. Debru’s “deconstruction and reconstruction” (p. 10) of Galen’s ideas is masterful and thorough. She establishes a convincing chronology of his work and goes on to discuss his predecessors and contemporaries and his conceptual and philosophical apparatus. The account that follows fits together Galen’s theories with his experiments in exacting detail, resulting in the clearest exposition I have yet seen both of these theories and of his experimental techniques. Debru’s account of his techniques fully justifies Grmek’s claim of Galen’s superiority as an experimentalist.

Debru spends a chapter on the topic of “perspiration,” the ancient notion that the body as a whole respired—an idea that was revived in the seventeenth...