GALEN ‘ON ANATOMICAL PROCEDURES’

The treatise of which the latter part is here presented in English translation has, like some other works of Galen, experienced a chequered history, most of which we learn from Galen himself, in the opening chapter of the work, which is in the nature of a preface, and in a passage at the end of Book xi (below, pp. 107–8). It began as a comparatively brief treatise, in two Books, written at the request of Flavius Boëthus in A.D. 165. Later, after the death of Boëthus (in or shortly before A.D. 169), the work became unobtainable, since Galen's own copies in Rome had been destroyed in a fire, and Galen's friends accordingly pressed him to rewrite it. This he eventually did, but he took advantage of the opportunity to replan it on a much larger scale, and to include in it the fruits of his latest observations. He began this task in A.D. 177, and it is to this year that Dr Singer assigns the entire work. In Dr Singer's view, the treatise is not a literary work, written down as such, but rather ‘a shorthand record of actual lectures, though doubtless lightly revised by its author’. It is certainly true that there are numerous passages in which Galen seems to be addressing a pupil or an audience, and the considerable amount of repetition, wearisome to the modern reader, would be readily understandable in a text which is a verbatim transcript of lectures.