Ancient Medicine in the Galenic Corpus: The Story of a Concealment

Abstract

The paper proposes, starting from some certain or probable allusions (in part. a passage in Galen's Commentary on 'Epidemics' 2, only extant in Arabic translation), but also from some striking omissions ('Ancient medicine' is not mentioned in the history of hygiene that Galen traces out in the central chapters of Thrasybulus), to reconstruct the history of this significant ‘concealment’. This will also be done in the light of the numerous passages in the corpus in which Galen advocates, constantly linking it to Hippocrates, the ideal of medicine that is ‘physiologica’.