Galen in Asia?

Abstract

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY License. chapter 30 Galen in Asia?Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim Although one can generally say that the place of Galen in the history of Asian medical systems is rather minor, such a statement nonetheless requires some qualification.1 Galen appears in the rich Tibetan literary genre of medical histories as one of the figures who brought medical knowledge to Tibet. More significantly, in India, Galen was a key figure in Unani (literally 'Greek medicine'), which continues to thrive on the subcontinent. With regards to China, there are a number of anecdotal mentions of Galen in works either referring to China or composed in China. In most of the cases discussed here, Galen comes to Asia through mediating languages, primarily Persian and Syriac, and medical traditions -Islamic medicine in the case of India and Renaissance medicine in the case of the Jesuits in China.2 Hence, the story of Galen in Asia is to a large degree an extension of these medical and literary traditions.Two related but separate issues need addressing when trying to assess the place of Galen in Asia. The first issue is an assessment of mentions of Galen in Asian texts and contexts. Narratives on the origins and history of medicine, and knowledge more generally, are important within this regard. Analysis of how and why these narratives were constructed can reveal important political, religious, economic, and cultural factors at play. The second issue is the presence, or lack thereof, of Galenic medical knowledge within Asian traditions. These two issues in turn raise a third one involving the relationship between them: If a tradition declares itself to be influenced by Galenic medicine, does it necessarily mean that it is so? Narratives on the origins of medical knowledge raise the large and complicated question of whether and to what extent such accounts actually reflect the nature of the knowledge they describe. In other words, they raise questions like: When and why does a culture, religion, or state ideology choose to present or construct itself as linked to a particular culture? Are there correspondences between declaring a tradition as linked to a particular tradition and the tradition indeed being linked?