Levels of explanation in Galen

Abstract

Galen's æuvre presents a remarkably varied body of texts–varied in subject matter, style, and didactic purpose. Logical tracts sit alongside tomes of drug–lore; handbooks of dietetics alongside anatomical investigations; treatises of physiology alongside ethicalopuscula. These differences in type have received some, though as yet insufficient, scholarly attention. Mario Vegetti demonstrated the coexistence of two ‘profili’ or images of the art of medicine: Galen presents the art as an Aristotelian deductive science, on the one hand, and as a technician's craft, on the other. The former image, offering an ambitious elevation of the doctor's cultural status, has medicine as a philosophicalepistemeanalogous to the mathematical sciences, exercised above all to provide causal accounts and logical demonstrations, and centred on the knowledge of anatomy. The second image is that of the clinician, concerned with the body in its pathological manifestations and using as its prime model the ‘pre-anatomical’ theory of the humours. And the content of the treatises shifts in relation to this dual image: ‘profilo alto’ and ‘profilo basso’ are reflected in different types of work. Polemical writings such as the Protrepticus, as well as the great treatises of anatomy and physiology,De usu partiumandDe naturalibus facultatibus, present medicine in the former light, while works like DetemperamentisorQuod animi moresbase themselves on humoral pathology and accord with the earlier, artisan-like image.

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