HIST 449 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve, Pylades, Patrophilus Of Scythopolis
9 Jun 2018
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HIST 449- Feb 15
Galen: A life of Medicine Continued
Prognosis, the demonstration of the recurrent laryngeal nerve
• Going to be a demonstration, he will be speaking about what he is doing
• Fine and hair like nerve if severed would make the animal lose their voice
but not be harmed
• Almost like a magic show
• Gleason argues that this anatomical show resonate with the discourse of
truth, power and the body
• In vivisection, there are multiple forms of coercion
• The animal is like the body of slave or a POW
• As he forces the animal to submit to his experiment, so he also would compel
his audience to agree to his truth claims
• By controlling whether the body of the animal can talk or not, he forces it to
submit to it
• Display of his genius
• This is his party trick, he does this a lot
Story: getting the truth out of the body
From On Prognosis
• There is a woman in a funk, but he determines that there is nothing
physically wrong with her
• He thinks that It must be psychological
• He is a firm believer that psychology can change your physical health
• He notices that when Pylades (a dancer) is mentioned, this woman pulse
changes
• Anxiety
• Theatre performers are the bottom of the heap, this woman has a crush on
this person
• Galen never tells us what he does with this information
• This illustration is a story of his prowess
• He thinks that the pulse cannot be felt for traces for love, but it can be felt for
traces for anxiety
Emperor Marcus Aurelius
161-180 CE
• Galen will be summoned back to Rome by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus
in 168
• Galen gives Marcus Aurelius advice to drink wine, it works and he thinks that
hes the bees knees
• Sabine wine with pepper
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Document Summary
Story: getting the truth out of the body. Introductory work for beginners: art of medicine, on pulses for beginners, on bones for beginners, on the sects for beginners. Commentaries on hippocratic works: prognosis, aphorisms, nature of man, premier interpreter of hippocrates, turned nature of man into a big deal, he wrote a hippocratic glossary, language changed a lot between his time. In animals the efficient cause= faculty: activity/work is a faculty in operation, the digestive faculty is what makes the activity work. The source model= three master organs: liver, heart an brain, tripartite soul= source of both physical and psychological activity, soul is operationalized by pnuema, underlying image= streams of pnuema. The local model= parts: on natural faculties, faculties are embedded into the parts of body, not under control of principal organs or souls, for example: the uterus, more micro version of physiology, he does not integrate the two. Soul (plato: concupiscible, plant soul, rational, humans have all 3 souls.
