Galen: Works on Human Nature: Volume 1, Mixtures (De Temperamentis)

Description

Mixtures is of central importance for Galen's views on the human body. It presents his influential typology of the human organism according to nine mixtures (or 'temperaments') of hot, cold, dry and wet. It also develops Galen's ideal of the 'well-tempered' person, whose perfect balance ensures excellent performance both physically and psychologically. Mixtures teaches the aspiring doctor how to assess the patient's mixture by training one's sense of touch and by a sophisticated use of diagnostic indicators. It presents a therapeutic regime based on the interaction between foods, drinks, drugs and the body's mixture. Mixtures is a work of natural philosophy as well as medicine. It acknowledges Aristotle's profound influence whilst engaging with Hippocratic ideas on health and nutrition, and with Stoic, Pneumatist and Peripatetic physics. It appears here in a new translation, with generous annotation, introduction and glossaries elucidating the argument and setting the work in its intellectual context.

P. N. Singer is a Wellcome Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. His research centres on Graeco-Roman medicine, especially Galen; on the interface of philosophical and medical ideas; and especially on the history of conceptions of the mind, psychology and ethics. He published the first major collection of texts by Galen in English translation with Galen: Selected Works (1997) and edited Galen: Psychological Writings (Cambridge, 2014), the first volume of the series Cambridge Galen Translations. He is also co-editor of a major study of conceptions of mental illness in the Graeco-Roman world, Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Paul of Aegina, (with Chiara Thumiger, 2018), and author of a range of articles on ancient concepts of psychology, the emotions, health, disease classification, pharmacology and physiology, as well as on aspects of ancient drama and performance culture. Philip J. van der Eijk is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Classics and History of Science at the Humboldt University Berlin. He has published on ancient medicine, philosophy and science, comparative literature and patristics. His main research interests are in Graeco-Roman ideas about mental and physical health and the mind-body relationship, in the history of knowledge transfer and in the forms and rhetorical features of scientific and philosophical writing. His books include Aristoteles: De Insomniis & De Divinatione Per Somnum (1994), Ancient Histories of Medicine (1999, edited), Diocles of Carystus (2000), Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 2005), Philoponus on Aristotle on the Soul I (2005), Hippocrates in Context (2005, edited), Nemesius on the Nature of Man (2008, with R. W. Sharples) and Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing (Cambridge, 2017, edited with M. Formisano). He is General Editor of the series Cambridge Galen Translations. Piero Tassinari was Lecturer in Classics at Cardiff University until 2017 and Research Associate for the Wellcome-funded project 'Towards a Galen in English' at Newcastle University until 2015. His research focused on ancient medicine, especially theories of fevers and diagnostics in late antiquity. His publications include Pseudo-Alessandro d'Afrodisia: Trattato sulla febbre (1994) and Galeno. Gli Elementi secondo la dottrina di Ippocrate. I Temperamenti (1997).