The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Philosophy
The Legacy of Greece: Essays By: Gilbert Murray, W. R. Inge, J. Burnet, Sir T. L. Heath, D'arcy W. Thompson, Charles Singer, R. W. Livingston, A. Toynbee, A. E. Zimmern, Percy Gardner, Sir Reginald Blomfield
Greece -- Civilization
Later Galen and Hippocrates became a little more accessible, not by
translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a
Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version of
_Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were already
available in Latin dress, together with the Hippocratic _Regimen in
acute diseases_, and certain works of Galen as corruptly interpreted by
Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into Latin by
Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte Cassino
and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman with an
imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective was the
great twelfth-century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of Cremona
(died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from Arabic, and
who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more important for
the advance of medicine, however, was the learned revival of the
thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based on translations
from Arabic, but a certain number of works were also rendered direct
from the Greek. During the thirteenth century Aristotle's scientific
works began to be treated in this way, but more important for the course
of medicine were those of Galen, and they had to wait till the following
century. The long treatise of Galen, περι χρειας των εν ανθρωπου σωματι
μοριων {peri chreias tôn en anthrôpou sômati moriôn}, _On the uses of
the bodily parts in man_, was translated from the Greek into Latin by
Nicholas of Reggio in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This
work, with all its defects, was by far the best account of the human
body then available. Many manuscripts of the Latin version have
survived, and it was translated into several vernaculars, including
English, and profoundly influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of
this treatise, and its wide distribution, may be regarded as the
starting-point of modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover
a part of the phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had
begun to be practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[98]
and was a generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and
fifteenth.[99]
[98] Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the
eleventh century.
[99] The sources of the anatomical knowledge of the Middle Ages are
discussed in detail in the following works: R. R. von Töply,
_Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter_, Vienna, 1898;
K. Sudhoff, _Tradition und Naturbeobachtung_, Leipzig, 1907; and
also numerous articles in the _Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und
Naturwissenschaften_; Charles Singer, 'A Study in Early Renaissance
Anatomy', in _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i,
Oxford, 1917.
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