Divide and Understand

The ancient Greek physician Galen (d. around 216 CE) is one of the central figures within the history of medicine. The basis of Galenic medicine is humoral theory which describes the conditions of human bodies as mixtures of the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. In his substantial work, Galen described humoral and, more generally, medical theory in great detail. In late antique Alexandria, sixteen of his writings were arranged to form a medical curriculum according to which medical students were henceforth trained. In the Alexandrian schools, these texts were also comprehensively interpreted and commented. Although only a few of these commentaries are preserved in Greek, it is clear that the late antique commentary tradition had a great impact on the emergence and the development of Galenic medicine in the Arabic-Islamic world. From the 9th century onwards Galens work was translated into Arabic and in the middle of the 10th century scholars started to expound and interpret it in Baghdad, Mosul, Cairo and Nishapur. Ibn Abi l-Ash`ath (d. around 975) structured the existing Arabic Galen translation and divided them into chapters, subchapters and paragraphs. His younger contemporaries Ibn al-Tayyib (d. 1043), Ibn Ridwan (d. 1061) and Ibn Abi Sadiq (fl. 11th cen.) wrote detailed commentaries dividing the Galenic writings into sections, so-called lemmata on which they then commented. Within the project Divide and Understand, we enquire in how far structuring and dividing a text influences its understanding. Is one and the same Galenic treatise understood, expounded and interpreted differently if it is divided into sections in various ways? If so, structuring and division are not only pedagogical tools that facilitate the studying, memorising and understanding of Galens texts, but also exegetical tools the working of which we want to examine. Further, we attempt to answer the question why later scholars did no longer write Arabic lemmatic commentaries on Galens treatises. There are no other Galenic commentaries known than the ones by Ibn Abi Ash`ath, Ibn al-Tayyib, Ibn Ridwan and Ibn Abi Sadiq that were all composed within a period of about hundred years, namely between 950 and 1075 CE. A hypothesis that we put to the test is that from the 11th century onwards, the influence of the famous polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna) became overpowering in the Arabic-Islamic world and it was therefore his works that were commented on in the fields of philosophy and medicine alike. Ibn Sina would have thus replaced Aristotle as the philosophical and Galen as the medical authority.