Galen: On the Natural Faculties

The text used is (with a few unimportant modifications) that of Kühn (Vol. II), as edited by Georg Helmreich; Teubner, Leipzig, 1893. The numbers of the pages of Kühn’s edition are printed at the side of the Greek text, a parallel mark (||) in the line indicating the exact point of division between Kühn’s pages.
Words in the English text which are enclosed in square brackets are supplementary or explanatory; practically all explanations, however, are relegated to the footnotes or introduction. In the footnotes, also, attention is drawn to words which are of particular philological interest from the point of view of modern medicine.
My best thanks are due to the Editors for their courtesy and for the kindly interest they have taken in the work. I have also gratefully to acknowledge the receipt of much assistance and encouragement from Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and from Dr. J. D. Comrie, first lecturer on the History of Medicine at Edinburgh University. Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson of University College, Dundee, and Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, late director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, have very kindly helped me to identify several animals and plants mentioned by Galen.
I cannot conclude without expressing a word of gratitude to my former biological teachers, Professors Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. The experience reared on the foundation of their teaching has gone far to help me in interpreting the great medical biologist of Greece.
I should be glad to think that the present work might help, however little, to hasten the coming reunion between the “humanities” and modern biological science; their present separation I believe to be against the best interest of both.
A. J. B.
22nd Stationary Hospital, Aldershot . March , 1916.
Hippocrates and Galen. If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of Galen, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit or apex of the same edifice. Galen’s merit is to have crystallised or brought to a focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages.