| Book Review | Health and History, 7.2

Book Review

Galen: On the Properties of Foodstuffs. Introduction, Translation and Commentary by Owen Powell (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, hb, ISBN 0-5218-1242-9) 232pp.

Galen (AD 129-?199/216), originally a doctor to gladiators in Asia Minor, became court physician in the Rome of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Owen Powell is a retired specialist physician and medical administrator turned classical scholar. This book began life as an MA thesis, the degree being conferred in 1994. One can only regret that it took another nine years for such a substantial piece of scholarship to reach a wider audience. (To think that the first American doctorate in Classics was 'earned' at Yale in 1861 with a six-page Latin dissertation on the theme Brevis Vita, Ars Longa!)

This is not the first English translation of Galen's treatise to be published: Mark Grant's Galen on Food and Diet appeared under the Routledge banner in 2000. It includes annotated translations of the present work and five shorter pieces. Grant teaches Classics at Haileybury College in Hertford, UK. (He was formerly a chef and trained in catering management.)

Grant's book is impressive; Powell's even more so. While the two translations of Galen's elegant if somewhat prolix Greek are roughly comparable, Powell's is much more user-friendly in that he has provided, as a reference tool, the pagination of the 1823 edition of Carl Gottlieb Kühn in the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum series. This review will do the same.

Grant's book begins with a thirteen-page introduction on Galen's life and works; Powell's introduction runs to a substantial nineteen pages. Grant's commentary takes four pages; Powell's thirty-three. Grant adds a glossary of ninety plant names with English, Greek and botanical equivalents for each; Powell's Appendix I lists 117 plants in similar fashion. Then Appendix II contains a list of thirty-four fishes with common names in English and Greek, as well as, commendably, Linnaean taxonomies, the system of binomial nomenclature devised by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (1707–1788).

One example of the differing depth of the two works is the writers' views on the translation of the term pepsis. Grant adopts 'digestion' as being easy to understand while acknowledging a danger of 'slippage' from the true meaning. He asserts that 'for the purist the original text is readily available for comparison.' But what of the purists who have no Greek? They actually do exist. Powell tackles the issue with a fifteen-line treatment of pepsis, explaining clearly why he settles for 'concoction.' He does the same, and at even greater length, with eight other terms in an enlightening section, 'Galen's medical and scientific terminology' (20–28). Powell includes Grant in his bibliography, though the only reference in the body of his book occurs when he compliments Grant on his 'neat translation' of tagenitai/teganitai (490) as 'griddle/girdle.'

Galen's treatise reflects the fact that, by the time of Celsus (around the first century A.D.), the author of De Medicina, dietetics had become one of the three main branches of therapeutics, along with surgery and pharmacology. It is an area to which many believe modern physicians give too little attention. Hippocrates (c. 460–380 B.C.) laid the foundations of dietetics, both empirical and theoretical. Galen's principal role was to build on those foundations, codifying and modifying the work of doctors before him. At the same time, he frequently acknowledged the need for further research. His work of codification is enriched and enlivened by personal observations and interesting case studies.

Examples are legion. He tells of how his own father turned to farming in his later years, growing wheat and barley despite the problem posed by troublesome alien seeds (552). For Galen himself, a lettuce eaten in the evening was the only antidote for insomnia (626). He presents a rare vignette of impromptu meals with peasants, as well as peasant women at work making rather indigestible bread (498). He describes the deleterious effects on an infant whose wet-nurse was full of 'unhealthy humour': the infant developed numerous ulcers (686).

Galen is not without his prejudices, which he airs in a rather combative style of rhetoric. He was, for example, like many doctors through the ages, rather disparaging of cooks: 'We physicians aim at benefits from foods, not at pleasure. But for cooks tastiness for the most part makes use of harmful seasonings' (638–639). Above all, he had no time for Atticizers, those who chose to speak Attic, one of the five major Greek dialect groups. Granted, Attic, the dialect spoken in Attica and hence by Athenians, had at one stage conquered the entire Greek-speaking world. It then, however, gradually evolved into koine, or 'common,' Greek, which became the lingua franca of the Hellenistic world. Galen fulminated against those diehards who clung to 'pure' Attic instead of moving with the times. Some samples: 'It is better to teach things clearly than to Atticize in the old-fashioned way' (579) and 'This is not written for those who prefer to Atticize in their speech (for perhaps someone who is disdainful of a healthy body, as also of a healthy mind, will not even want to read about it)' (584). And perhaps the most excoriating of all is his reference to 'those who practise the accursed pseudo-education' (633).

Powell attributes such observations to Galen's 'overriding desire for clarity' (19). So did John Wilkins of Exeter University in his foreword to Powell's book: 'Galen's was a matter of clarity rather than of principle' (xiv). But surely Galen's prejudice goes more deeply. Ancient Greeks were notorious for quarrelling with one another. The English playwright Nathaniel Lee might well have had them in mind when he wrote in 1677, 'When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war!' Galen was a brilliant polymath from the Asian side of the Greek world, born in Pergamum, a city renowned for its beauty, wealth and culture, whose library rivalled that of Alexandria. After studying rhetoric, logic and philosophy in Pergamum, he pursued a medical course first in Smyrna, another major Asian city, and then in Alexandria, a centre of learning without peer. Small wonder then that he despised the pedantry of Atticizers, and clearly his strictures go beyond the matter of accurate terminology. They despise healthy bodies and healthy minds. How unGreek! Their claim to be educated is mere affectation.

Several of Galen's themes strike a chord with modern readers. Does wine give nourishment? Yes. The proponents of the Polymeal, described in The British Medical Journal for 17 December 2004, would applaud wholeheartedly. Is wine a food or a drink? (743), and which are more nourishing, reds or whites? Reds, according to Galen, being 'most useful for the production of blood' (744). More applause from modern dietitians, for his verdict if not his explanation. Likewise, poppyseed is useful sprinkled on bread as seasoning (548). Indian hemp seeds 'taken in quantity over a short period affect the head, sending up to it a vapour that is both warm and like a drug' (550). Apricots 'to most people seem more pleasant and so [my emphasis] are better for the stomach' (593). (Powell rightly points to the music hall ditty 'A little of what you fancy does you good.')

Galen also clearly recognises what we know as cirrhosis of the liver: he describes a liver as inflamed, cicatricized and associated, as physicians know to expect today, with a damaged, enlarged spleen (608). He mentions the dangers of eating mushrooms, including an excess of the 'least harmful' field mushrooms: 'It is safer not even to touch the rest at all, for many people have died from them' (656). Furthermore, 'Garlic is eaten not only as a relish but also as a health-giving medication' (658).

The book is refreshingly free from errors. A few minor quibbles: in the commentary the reference for the date-palm should be 622, not 623; for honeydew, 739, not 740. In the translation of 552, aigilops, the correct transliteration of the Greek term, becomes aegilops four lines further down. In the index, the pages given to 'anorexia' should include 121.

Powell is considerate of his readers: the list of ancient sources (192–194) gives English versions of all titles. Items included in the commentary are flagged by asterisks in the translation. As one would expect of CUP, the book is attractively presented. The very dust-jacket, depicting a beautifully preserved red-orange Samian ware bowl with items of food (goat, rabbit, boar, fruits) against a black background, is irresistible. This is a very important book. It makes a major contribution to scholarship on Galen.

Don Barrett

University of Queensland

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