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Galen in Late Antique Medical Handbooks
Petros Bouras-VallianatosStudying the medical literature that was produced from the fourth to the seventh century ad is central to an understanding of how Galen's corpus impacted on the production of medical works, and to some extent on medical practice, during this early period as well as later, through the reception of the late antique medical literature itself in subsequent periods and in different intellectual environments. The medical literature of this period can be divided into two main categories, each corresponding to the basic purpose the texts were intended to serve. First, the fifth to the seventh century in particular was a period marked by the production of texts of a clearly didactic nature, such as commentaries and summaries, which were connected with the teaching of medicine. These texts aimed to complement the study of the Hippocratic and Galenic works that formed the Alexandrian curriculum.1 Although only a small proportion of these texts survive today in the original Greek, others are accessible through Arabic translations.2 Second, this period also saw the production of medical handbooks in Greek and Latin. These works, although differing in thematic arrangement, levels of expertise, and length, all share a common purpose, viz. to assist their readers in consulting practical recommendations, mainly diagnostic and therapeutic, from a variety of sources in the accessible format of a single work. This chapter explores the use and adaptation of the Galenic corpus in the hands of late antique medical compilers. It is divided into two main sections dealing with Greek and Latin authors respectively.
