Chapter IV: Galen (3)

We must limit ourselves to a hasty survey of a few specimens of its prescriptions. Following Archigenes, ligatures and crowns are employed for headaches.[808] In contrast to Galen’s previous scepticism concerning depilatories for eyebrows we now find a number mentioned, including the blood of a bed-bug.[809] To cure lumbago,[810] if the pain is in the right foot, reduce to powder with your right hand the wings of a swallow. Then make an incision in the swallow’s leg and draw off all its blood. Skin it and roast it and eat it entire. Then anoint yourself all over with the oil for three days and you will marvel at the result. “This has been often proved by experience.” To prevent hair from falling out take many bees and burn them and mix with oil and use as an ointment.[811] For a sty in the eye catch flies, cut off their heads, and rub the sty with the rest of their bodies.[812] A cooked black chameleon performs the double duty of curing toothache and killing mice.[813] To extract a tooth in the upper jaw surround it with the worms found in the tops of cabbages; for a lower tooth use the worms on the lower parts of the leaves.[814] Pain in the intestines will vanish, if the patient drinks water in which his feet have been washed.[815] A net transferred from a woman’s hair to the patient’s head acts as a laxative, especially if the net is first heated.[816] Various superstitious devices are suggested to insure the birth of a child of the sex desired.[817] Bituminous trefoil,[818] boiled and applied hot, cures snake or spider bite, but let no one use it who is not so afflicted or it will make him feel as if he was.[819] For cataract is recommended a mixture of equal parts of mouse’s blood, cock’s gall, and woman’s milk, dried.[820] For pain on one side of the head or face smear with fifteen earthworms and fifteen grains of pepper powdered in vinegar.[821] To stop a cough wear the tongue of an eagle as an amulet.[822] Wearing a root of rhododendron makes one fearless of dogs and would cure a mad dog itself, if it could be tied on the animal.[823] A “confection” covering three pages is said to prolong life, to have been used by the emperors, and to have enabled Pythagoras, its inventor, who began to make use of it at the age of fifty, to live to be one hundred and seventeen without disease. “And he was a philosopher and unable to lie about it.”[824]

[Sidenote: External signs of the temperaments of internal organs.]

It remains to note what there is in Galen’s works in the way of divination and astrology. We are not entirely surprised that contemporary doctors confused his medical prognostic with divination, when we read what he has to say concerning the outward signs of hot or cold internal organs. In the treatise, entitled _The Healing Art_ (τέχνη ἰατρική),[825] which Mewaldt says was the most studied of Galen’s works and spread in a vast number of medieval Latin manuscript translations,[826] he devotes a number of chapters to such subjects as signs of a hot and dry heart, signs of a hot liver, and signs of a cold lung. Among the signs of a cold brain are excessive excrements from the head, stiff straight red hair, a late birth, mal-nutrition, susceptibility to injury from cold causes and to catarrh, and somnolence.[827]

[Sidenote: Marvelous statements repeated by Maimonides.]

In his commentary on the _Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates Galen adds other signs by which it may be foretold whether the child will be a boy or girl to those signs already mentioned by Hippocrates.[828] Some of these seem superstitious enough to us. And it was a case of the evil that men do living after them, for Moses Maimonides, the noted Jewish physician of Cordova in the twelfth century, in his collection of _Aphorisms_, drawn chiefly from the works of Galen, repeats the following method of prognostication: _Puerum cum primo spermatizat perscrutare, quem si invenis habere testiculum dextrum maiorem sinistro_, you will know that his first child will be a male, otherwise female. The same may be determined in the case of a girl by a comparison of the size of her breasts. Maimonides also repeats, from Galen’s work to Caesar on theriac,[829] the story of the ugly man who secured a beautiful son by having a beautiful boy painted on the wall and making his wife keep her eyes fixed upon it. Maimonides also repeats from Galen[830] the story of the bear’s licking its unformed cubs into shape.[831]

[Sidenote: Dreams.]

In another treatise on _Diagnosis from Dreams_ Galen makes a closer approach to the arts of divination.[832] He states that dreams are affected by our daily life and thought, and describes a few corresponding to bodily states or caused by them. He thinks that if you dream you see fire, you are troubled by yellow bile, and if you dream of vapor or darkness, by black bile. In diagnosing dreams one should note when they occurred and what had been eaten. But Galen also believes that to some extent the future can be predicted from dreams, as has been testified, he says, by experience.[833] We have already mentioned the effect of his father’s dream upon Galen’s career. In the Hippocratic commentaries[834] he says that some scorn dreams and omens and signs, but that he has often learned from dreams how to prognosticate or cure diseases. Once a dream instructed him to let blood between the index and great fingers of the right hand until the flow of blood stopped of its own accord. “It is necessary,” he concludes, “to observe dreams accurately both as to what is seen and what is done in sleep in order that you may prognosticate and heal satisfactorily.” Perhaps he had a dim idea along Freudian lines.

[Sidenote: Lack of astrology in most of Galen’s medicine.]

In the ordinary run of Galen’s pharmacy and therapeutics there is very little mention or observance of astrological conditions, although Hippocrates is cited as having said that a study of geometry and astronomy—which may well mean astrology—is essential in medicine.[835] In the _De methodo medendi_ he often urges the importance of the time of year, the region, and the state of the sky.[836] But this expression seems to refer to the weather rather than to the position of the constellations. The dog-star is also occasionally mentioned,[837] and one passage[838] tells how “Aeschrion the Empiric, ... an old man most experienced in drugs and our fellow citizen and teacher,” burned live river crabs on a plate of red bronze after the rise of the dog-star when the sun entered Leo and on the eighteenth day of the moon. We are also informed that many Romans are in the habit of taking theriac on the first or fourth day of the moon.[839] But Galen ridicules Pamphilus for his thirty-six sacred herbs of the horoscope—or decans, taken from an Egyptian Hermes book.[840] On the other hand, one of his objections to the atomists is that “they despise augury, dreams, portents, and all astrology,” as well as that they deny a divine artificer of the world and an innate moral law to the soul.[841] Thus atheism and disbelief in astrology are put on much the same plane.

[Sidenote: _The Prognostication of Disease by Astrology._]

Whereas there is so little to suggest a belief in astrology in most of Galen’s works, we find among them two devoted especially to astrological medicine, namely, a treatise on critical days in which the influence of the moon upon disease is assumed, and the _Prognostication of Disease by Astrology_. In the latter he states that the Stoics favored astrology, that Diodes Carystius represented the ancients as employing the course of the moon in prognostications, and that, if Hippocrates said that physicians should know physiognomy, they ought much more to learn astrology, of which physiognomy is but a part.[842] There follows a statement of the influence of the moon in each sign of the zodiac and in its relations to the other planets.[843] On this basis is foretold what diseases a man will have, what medical treatment to apply, whether the patient will die or not, and if so in how many days. This treatise is the same as that ascribed in many medieval manuscripts to Hippocrates and translated into Latin by both William of Moerbeke and Peter of Abano.

[Sidenote: Critical days.]

The treatise on critical days discusses them not by reason or dogma, lest sophists befog the plain facts, but solely, we are told, upon the basis of clear experience.[844] Having premised that “we receive the force of all the stars above,”[845] the author presents indications of the especially great influence of sun and moon. The latter he regards not as superior to the other planets in power, but as especially governing the earth because of its nearness.[846] He then discusses the moon’s phases, holding that it causes great changes in the air, rules conceptions and birth, and “all beginnings of actions.”[847] Its relations to the other planets and to the signs of the zodiac are also considered and much astrological technical detail is introduced.[848] But the Pythagorean theory that the numbers of the critical days are themselves the cause of their significance in medicine is ridiculed, as is the doctrine that odd numbers are masculine and even numbers feminine.[849] Later the author also ridicules those who talk of seven Pleiades and seven stars in either Bear and the seven gates of Thebes or seven mouths of the Nile.[850] Thus he will not accept the doctrine of perfect or magic numbers along with his astrological theory. Much of this rather long treatise is devoted to a discussion of the duration of a moon, and it is shown that one of the moon’s quarters is not exactly seven days in length and that the fractions affect the incidence of the critical days.

[Sidenote: _On the history of philosophy._]

A treatise on the history of philosophy, which is marked “spurious” in Kühn’s edition, I have also discovered among the essays of Plutarch where, too, it is classed as spurious.[851] In some ways it is suggestive of the middle ages. After an account of the history of Greek philosophy somewhat in the style of the brief reviews of the same to be found in the church fathers, it adds a sketch of the universe and natural phenomena not dissimilar to some medieval treatises of like scope. There are chapters on the universe, God, the sky, the stars, the sun, the moon, the _magnus annus_, the earth, the sea, the Nile, the senses, vision and mirrors, hearing, smell and taste, the voice, the soul, breathing, the processes of generation, and so on.

[Sidenote: Divination and demons.]

In discussing divination[852] the treatise states that Plato and the Stoics attributed it to God and to divinity of the spirit in ecstasy, or to interpretation of dreams or astrology or augury. Xenophanes and Epicurus denied it entirely. Pythagoras admitted only divination by _haruspices_ or by sacrifice. Aristotle and Dicaearchus admit only divination by enthusiasm and by dreams. For although they deny that the human soul is immortal, they think that there is something divine about it. Herophilus said that dreams sent by God must come true. Other dreams are natural, when the mind forms images of things useful to it or about to happen to it. Still others are fortuitous or mere reflections of our desires. The treatise also takes up the subject of heroes and demons.[853] Epicurus denied the existence of either, but Thales, Plato, Pythagoras, and the Stoics agree that demons are natural substances, while heroes are souls separate from bodies, and are good or bad according to the lives of the men who lived in those bodies.

[Sidenote: Celestial bodies.]

The treatise also gives the opinions of various Greek philosophers on the question whether the universe or its component spheres are either animals or animated. Fate is defined on the authority of Heracleitus as “the heavenly body, the seed of the genesis of all things.”[854] The question is asked why babies born after seven months live, while those born after eight months die.[855] On the other hand, a very brief discussion of how the stars prognosticate does not go into particulars beyond their indication of seasons and weather, and even this Anaximenes ascribed to the effect of the sun alone.[856] Philolaus the Pythagorean is quoted concerning some lunar water about the stars[857] which reminds one of the waters above the firmament in the first chapter of Genesis.