The remarkable and rapid growth of Galenic studies in recent years is reflected in this volume of conference proceedings. It is concerned with a number of Galenic works that, for a variety of reasons, were not included in the old—but in many respects still indispensable—nineteenth-century edition of Galen's works by Carl Gottlob Kühn. Some of these works survive only in Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew or Armenian translations, whereas for others the Greek tradition was not yet available to Kühn—and indeed this corpus of new Galenic works, or parts thereof, or new versions of works already known, continues to be supplemented by new, sometimes spectacular discoveries. ‘Galen beyond Kühn’, the original title of the 1999 conference, would perhaps have been a more appropriate title for the volume, considering that even to Galen specialists, let alone to the wider scholarly community, many of Galen's works as included in Kühn are even more unknown (and even more inaccessible) than the works singled out for discussion here. For one thing, these works have at least received a proper critical edition and in most cases some further scholarly treatment—something which still cannot be said of, for example, Galen's pharmacological writings as included in vols. 11–13 of Kühn's edition. As always, new discoveries attract more immediate attention and excitement, but this should not obscure the urgent need for study of works “known” but left untouched on the library shelves for centuries.
Having said that, this collection is a welcome and valuable addition to scholarship, though obviously more for the individual contributions it contains than for any unifying theme or umbrella under which they are brought together. After the editor's introduction (‘In defence of Kühn’), in which the principles and the limitations of Kühn's editorial project are positioned against the background of medicine and medical historiography in early nineteenth-century Germany, discussions follow of Galen's On the parts of the medical techne (Heinrich von Staden), On the thinning diet (John Wilkins), Introduction to logic (Suzanne Bobzien), On unclear movements (Armelle Debru), the Arabic books of On anatomical procedures (Julius Rocca), and the Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics book II (Rebecca Flemming, concentrating on the gynaecological sections). In addition, Véronique Boudon discusses new Arabic evidence for the text of On my own books (the Greek text of which was edited by Müller in 1891 in the Scripta minora), Emilie Savage-Smith deals with references to Galen's lost writings on ophthalmology as testified in the Arabic versions of Alexandrian summaries, and Gotthard Strohmaier gives a more general account of the reception of Galen's works in Arabic literature. Gerrit Bos covers the reception of Galen in Maimonides' Medical aphorisms, while Michael McVaugh examines references (mostly in Guy de Chauliac) to lost parts of the Latin tradition of Galenic works (especially the Method of healing). Somewhat apart from this stands Diethard Nickel's critical (and largely negative) discussion of C J Larrain's attempts (published in 1992) to identify hitherto unknown parts of Galen's lost commentary on Plato's Timaeus.
The volume concludes with an appendix listing scholarly editions of Galenic works not printed in Kühn (though unfortunately the principles of selection on which this is based are not sufficiently clearly explained to account for the absence of, for example, Lyons' edition of In Hippocratis de officina medici commentarii, and Stroppiana's edition of De dissectione vocalium instrumentorum, or Jelinek's translation of De anima). There is also an index of names and topics and an index of Galenic passages quoted. The latter is symptomatic of the somewhat restricted scope of the volume, most contributions providing a rather descriptive account of the texts in question and their relationship to other Galenic works, although some contextualization is not wholly absent: thus von Staden sets the divisions of medicine as made in Galen's text against the historical background of medical specialization and urbanization in later antiquity, Bobzien discusses the Peripatetic background of Galen's treatise on logic, and Flemming draws parallels with other gynaecological literature such as Soranus.
