De Juvamentis Membrorum and the reception of Galenic physiological anatomy.

Abstract

G ALEN'S MOST IMPORTANT WORK on functional anatomy is De usu partium. It is complementary to the work on morphology and the techniques of dissection, De anatomicis administrationibus, and to that on the biological forces which were the basis of his physiology, De naturalibusfacultatibus. All three works give us the theoretical background of Galen's biomedical system; in particular De usu partium deals with the form and function of the body in the context of Galen's natural-philosophical worldview. The transmission of this text through subsequent ages is therefore of considerable interest. Galen's position at the height of Hellenistic culture was not regained by those who followed. In the absence of a comparable figure able to assimilate and transcend Galen's achievement, progress in anatomy and physiology was not made. The three major Galenic works remained in the library at Alexandria, but teaching depended on a single work, Minor Anatomy, compiled from Galen's short introductory works on the five tissue systems (nerves, veins, arteries, muscles, and bones).' It is probably as a result of this arrangement that Arabic and early medieval Western medical education gave little attention to anatomy. The two major Galenic anatomical works were rendered intelligible to the less sophisticated ages that followed Galen by the production of summaries and abstracts: De usu partium was compressed into a very small compass by the Byzantine Theophilus Protospatharius, and Oribasius' extracts from De anatomicis administrationibus (4th century) are all that remain from the lost Greek of the second half of that work. After this period De usu partium was the sole vehicle of physiological anatomy as applied to man and therefore of use in a medical context. The surviving first half of De anatomicis administrationibus was not widely known before Latin versions were produced by Chalcondylas and Guinter in the earlier sixteenth century, and the techniques of dissection that Galen describes within it are clearly applied to apes, not man. Although Aristotle's works on animals had been known in the Middle Ages in the translations by Michael Scot and William of Moerbeke, Aristotle had admitted that the inside of man was one of the most unknown of all things, and medical use of the zoological works was limited. Moreover, Aristotle's anatomical and physiological