Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition

340 Pages·2012·1.627 MB·English

by  Peter E. Pormann (editor)

I
Epidemics in Context
II
Scientia Graeco-Arabica
herausgegeben von
Marwan Rashed
Band 8
De Gruyter
III
Epidemics in Context
Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates
in the Arabic Tradition
edited by
Peter E. Pormann
De Gruyter
IV
ISBN 978-3-11-025979-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025980-3
ISSN 1868-7172
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
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Table of Contents V
(cid:4)
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4) 1
Bink Hallum, N. Peter Joosse, Peter E. Pormann,
Simon Swain, Uwe Vagelpohl
A New Manuscript: Istanbul, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi,
MS Ayasofya 3592 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4)15
Greek Epidemics
Philip J. van der Eijk
Exegesis, Explanation and Epistemology in Galen’s Commentaries on
Epidemics, Books One and Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4)25
Brooke Holmes
Sympathy between Hippocrates and Galen: The Case of Galen’s
Commentary on Hippocratesʼ ‘Epidemicsʼ, Book Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4)49
Robert Alessi
The Arabic Version of Galen’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’,
Book Two as a source for the Hippocratic Text: First Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4)71
Syriac and Arabic Epidemics
Grigory Kessel
The Syriac Epidemics and the Problem of Its Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (cid:4)93
Uwe Vagelpohl
Galen, Epidemics, Book One: Text, Transmission, Translation . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Oliver Overwien
The Art of the Translator, or: How did Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq and his
School Translate? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
VI Table of Contents
Gotthard Strohmaier
Galen the Pagan and Ḥunayn the Christian: Specific Transformations
in the Commentaries on Airs, Waters, Places and the Epidemics . . . . . . . . . . 171
The later Arabic medical tradition and the Epidemics
Bink Hallum
The Arabic Reception of Galen’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’  185
Peter E. Pormann, N. Peter Joosse
Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms in the Arabic Tradition:
The Example of Melancholy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
N. Peter Joosse, Peter E. Pormann
ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Prognostic’:
A Preliminary Exploration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Leigh Chipman
Recipes by Hippocrates, Galen and Ḥunayn in the Epidemics and in
Medieval Arabic Pharmacopoeias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
Introduction 1
(cid:4)
Introduction
The Hippocratic Epidemics and Galen’s commentary explicating them are
milestones in the development of both theoretical and clinical medicine.1 The
former contain case notes, detailing the development of various diseases in
actual patients. They display an acute sense of perception and attention to
detail in their clinical observations, paying heed to individual circumstances
and environmental conditions. It is thus not surprising that Galen, the greatest
physician of antiquity, chose to comment upon them with great care. He did,
however, already notice that not all the seven books of the Epidemics went back
to the historic Hippocrates, and that they rather constitute a mixture of notes
varying greatly in style and content. Consequently, Galen decided to comment
only on those books which he viewed as containing at least some genuinely
Hippocratic material, namely Books One, Two, Three, and Six.
The importance of both the Hippocratic Epidemics and Galen’s Commentary
was fully realised at different times throughout history, especially, it would ap-
pear, in those circles particularly concerned with clinical medicine rather than
medical scholasticism. In ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad, in an environment
which saw the rise of sophisticated hospitals, Ḥunayn ibn ʾIsḥāq translated
Galen’s work into Arabic, and even supplemented it occasionally. Moreover,
Ḥunayn himself wrote a treatise in question-and-answer format called Ques-
tions on the Epidemics (Masāʾil al-ʾIbīḏīmiyā), in which he engages with these
case notes and makes them digestible for students. Many other medical luminar-
ies in later times such as ʾAbū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī (Rhazes,
d. c. 925) and Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288) held the Epidemics in high esteem. The former
used them and Galen’s Commentary as a model for his own clinical work.2 Not
surprisingly, then, some of al-Rāzī’s most innovative medical research is based
on information contained in Galen’s Commentary on Hippocratesʼ ‘Epidemicsʼ.3
Ibn al-Nafīs, who famously discovered the pulmonary transit in defiance of Ga-
lenic orthodoxy, also composed a commentary on the Epidemics.4 Later, as can
be seen from one extant manuscript, a Jewish physician read Galen’s Commen-
1 See Fichtner 2011a, nos. 6–7, 16–20; Fichtner 2011b, nos. 96–100 for bibliographical
information about editions, translations, and studies. In this introduction, I will keep
documentation to a minimum; many of the points made here will be discussed in much more
detail in the contributions to the present volume.
2 Álvarez-Millán 1999, 2000, 2010.
3 Pormann 2008b, 105–7.
4 Bachmann 1971, Abou Aly 2000, see below, pp. 207–9.
2 Introduction
tary carefully, writing short titles or summaries in the margins of his copy in
Judaeo-Arabic (that is, Arabic written in Hebrew letters).5
Although Arab authors from Ḥunayn onwards took a great interest in Ga-
len’s Commentary on Hippocratesʼ ‘Epidemicsʼ, they also had to surmount some
significant obstacles. Ḥunayn already complained that the Greek manuscripts at
his disposal were in quite a woeful state: he could not find any complete copies.
The situation was even more difficult in the Renaissance Europe. Fully aware
of this deplorable state of the Greek tradition, in the 1620s the Scottish scholar
David Colville copied out carefully those parts of Ḥunayn’s Arabic translation
not extant in Greek.6 Roughly a century and a half later, the celebrated Arabist
Michael Casiri quoted extensively from the Arabic translation, and noted the
crucial importance of this version7, as did the famous German philologist Johan-
nes Mewaldt, saying: ‘Therefore, given that the Greek manuscrips [of Galen’s
Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’] are so deplorable, we have to rejoice
in the fact that this [Arabic] translation has come down to us […] (Gaudere
igitur debemus in tanta codicum Graecorum penuria, quod illa versio ad aetatem
nostram pervenit, […])’.8 The doyen of Graeco-Arabic studies, the German physi-
cian Max Simon, undertook to edit and translate this Arabic version, but passed
away before he could complete this task. Another German philologist, Franz
Pfaff, continued Simon’s work. When Wenkebach edited Galen’s Commentary
on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’ for the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, he called on
Pfaff to provide him with a German translation of the Arabic version, both to
improve the Greek text, where it is extant, and to supplement it, where it is
not.9 In order to do so, Pfaff drew on Simon’s previous efforts, and his origi-
nal aim was to publish the Arabic text alongside a revised German translation,
but the economic circumstances in Germany in the 1930s did not allow for the
then costly printing of the Arabic. Pfaff ended his preface by saying: ‘For the
sake of scholarly rigour, the Academy wants to print the Arabic text at a later
date, when the economic situation will again make it possible to allocate such
a great amount of resource (Der Wissenschaftlichkeit wegen will die Akademie
doch den arabischen Text auch drucken lassen, wenn die Wirtschaftslage den
Aufwand größerer Mittel wieder gestattet).’10
In 2006, more than seventy years later, this wish of the Academy had not yet
been realised. Moreover, scholars had become increasingly wary of Pfaff’s Ger-
5 These marginal notes appear in Madrid, Escorial, MS 804 árabe (henceforth MS E1).
6 His manuscript survives in Milan, Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, MS B 135 sup. (henceforth
MS M); see Löfgren/Traini 1975–95, vol. i., pp. 66–67, no. 105. On Colville, see Pormann 2009b.
7 Casiri 1760–70, vol. i., p. 249–57, nos. 800–1.
8 Quoted in Wenkeback/Pfaff 1934, xxii.
9 Wenkeback/Pfaff 1934.
10 Wenkeback/Pfaff 1934, xxxiii.
Introduction 3
man translation.11 Simon Swain and I discussed this situation in the autumn of
2006, and we decided that it was an opportune moment to rectify it by organis-
ing a project to edit the Arabic translation of this highly influential text, and
to make it available through a more reliable and accessible English translation.
The Wellcome Trust kindly agreed to fund this project, and thus the ‘Warwick
Epidemics’ were born. Uwe Vagelpohl and Bink Hallum joined the project as
post-doctoral research assistants, and carried out the bulk of the work: they
prepared a preliminary edition and translation of Galen’s commentary on Books
One and Two. As work progressed, it became clear that the team would benefit
from the input of colleagues working in adjacent areas. Therefore, we decided
to make our draft edition and translation available to interested scholars and
to invite them to engage with our material. We planned a conference at the
Warburg Institute in London to meet and discuss the preliminary results of this
engagement.
Hallum and Vagelpohl worked on a very tight schedule and managed to pro-
duce the draft editions and translations by early August 2010. More than a dozen
colleagues accepted our invitation to come to London in the second week on No-
vember 2010. In addition to the contributors to this volume, Rebecca Flemming,
Ivan Garofalo12, and Caroline Petit gave papers on ‘Women and Commentary in
Epidemics 2’, ‘Some Problems in the Arabic Translation of Galen’s Commentary
on Epidemics 1–3’, and ‘Proof and Demonstration in Galen’s Commentaries on
the Hippocratic Epidemics’, respectively. Furthermore, Peter Adamson, Charles
Burnett, James Montgomery, and Emilie Savage-Smith kindly agreed to chair
sessions. The ensuing discussions and exchanges helped us tremendously; and
they also showed us clearly that our project elicited a great amount of interest
from various scholarly disciplines.
Two of the speakers and contributors to this volume worked at the Cor-
pus Medicorum Graecorum, a long-running project of the Berlin-Brandenburg
Academy that had recently celebrated its centenary.13 Not only did these two
colleagues from the CMG attend our conference, but the CMG also agreed in
principle to publish the forthcoming editions and translations.14 The Warwick
Epidemics team therefore wishes to thank the CMG, and especially Christian
Brockmann, its project director, and Andreas Wittwer, its head of research.
11 See Strohmaier 1981, 189; and, more recently, Garofalo 2009, 2010a, 2010b.
12 Ivan Garofalo in particular deserves our gratitude, as he painstakingly worked through
the draft editions and translations, offering many corrections and suggestions. He had
already been in the process of publishing the results of his work on Galen’s Commentary on
Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’ in his own journal Galenos and elsewhere; see Garofalo 2009, 2010a,
2010b, 2011.
13 See Brockmann / Brunschön / Overwien 2009.
14 Vagelpohl 2012, Hallum / Vagelpohl 2012.
4 Introduction
The first short article which opens this volume discusses a newly discovered
manuscript containing parts of Ḥunayn’s Arabic translation of Galen’s Com-
mentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’, Book Two. To my mind, it illustrates the
synergies that result from the presence of a team working on different aspects
of Graeco-Arabic medical history. N. Peter Joosse, who is currently working on a
project to edit, translate, and study the Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Prognostic’
by the Arab physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baġdādī (d. 1231), found this new manu-
script during a research trip to Istanbul, where he was hunting for Prognostic
manuscripts. This short article argues that the manuscript which he found is of
crucial importance for the textual history, as it represents an independent wit-
ness to the Arabic version. The manuscript will therefore be fully considered in
Hallum’s and Vagelpohl’s forthcoming editions.
The remaining articles published here are all largely expanded and revised
versions of the papers originally presented at the Warburg Institute. They cluster
around three thematic areas: the Epidemics and Galen’s commentary on them in
the Greek tradition; their transmission into Syriac and Arabic; and their impact
in the context of the medieval Arabic medical tradition. The first two articles by
Philip J. van der Eijk and Brooke Holmes both explore the relationship between
the Hippocratic Epidemics and Galen’s commentary on them. Both show in their
way that Galen often read his own doctrine into the Hippocratic text. In other
words, his intention was not to elucidate the meaning that a fifth-century BC
physician could have given to the text. Rather, Galen’s commentary pursued
different aims and objectives; the two most prominent are undoubtedly the fol-
lowing. First, by reading his own doctrines into the Hippocratic text, Galen lent
them a veneer of respectability and authority that they would otherwise lack.
For if the great Hippocrates already adhered to these doctrines, then they were
much more likely to be correct; after all, they had stood the test of time. Second,
Galen operated in a highly competitive medical marketplace where physicians
of different persuasions vied for the attention of patrons and patients alike. And
Galen is positively combative in his Commentary on Hippocrates’ ‘Epidemics’,
ridiculing and refuting the explanations of earlier and contemporaneous ex-
egetes.
Both van der Eijk and Holmes analyse aspects of these two characteristics.
The former shows in particular that Galen used his own theoretical framework
to confute the commentaries of the Roman doctor Quintus (fl. AD 120–45) as
well as Empiricist physicians. For Galen, the method of qualified experience was
extremely important: it was not sufficient merely to resort to experience (em-
peiría), but it had to be coupled with reason (lógos). Although the Hippocratic
text, especially in the first book, contains more theoretical reflections, it cer-
tainly lacks the highly sophisticated medical doctrines that Galen attributed to
it, especially in the area of epistemology. Van der Eijk also highlights Galen’s
theoretical bias in relation to the case histories contained in the Epidemics. The