L'Homme et son corps dans la société traditionnelle

a Pergamene, friend of Galen's father, who had come to Rome ten years before Galen (p. 157), and later impugns Galen's motives on the basis of the supposed family connexion (p. 160). No evidence is cited, and there is none. The background here is that J. Ilberg, Neue Jahrb. 1905, 15: 286-287, conjectured that Eudemus must have been part of a kind ofPergamene Mafia whose members boosted one another in Rome, may have known Galen's father, etc. These conjectures were presented as facts in the Prosopographia Imperii Romani, 2nd ed., 1944 (the 1st ed., 1897, lacks the errors). We are in difficulties where, as here, our basic reference materials enshrine misinformation, especially where, as with Galen's voluminous writings, we lack dependable texts, indices, and collections of material such as this edition by Nutton sets out to provide. Hence we may be grateful for the feast we have before us to digest. Finally, on the subject of digesting the material, a remark about Nutton's summary statements concerning "the meaning and purpose.of prognosis in ancient and Galenic medicine." Nutton seems much more inclined than I would be to take Galen at his own valuation: "There can be no dispute over Galen's skill in prognosis and of the reputation he gained thereby, even though it was occasionally attributed to magic and divination" (p.232). Galen is our only witness for his methods and for his success. He also gives us his reasoning: e.g., in an apparently malarial condition, Galen could predict that the crisis would be complete and the disease totally disappear because he felt in the artery "an upward movement even more than a lateral expansion," which informed him that the body's Nature was about to cast off the morbid element in the humours by one of the various routes for evacuating excrement (p. 85-89). Clearly we should not prefer Galen's rationality to our own. We should not lament that others chose the Methodist reasoning rather than practise feeling that pulse, nor that medical prediction "degenerated" into the medieval Prognostica before confirming, where we can, Galen's facts and affirming his reasoning. Short ofthat, we are limited to drawing the lines between what we know and do not know. FRANCOISE LOUX, L'Homme et son corps dans la socie'te traditionnelle, with a preface by Jean Cuisenier, Paris, Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux, Although this attractively produced and well-illustrated volume was the official record …