John Caius and the Manuscripts of Galen

By Vivian Nutton

John Caius (1510-75) enjoyed a European reputation as a Galenist physician. This study, based on his marginalia preserved in Eton and Cambridge, describes Caius' immense efforts to see and collate medical manuscripts in Italy and England over almost two decades. His reports are important for a modern editor of Galen, since many of these 'codices' are, apparently, now lost, and some were of high quality. Caius' notes also shed light on the growth of medical humanism, on the accessibility of Greek books and manuscripts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the methods of Renaissance editors of Greek technical prose texts. Caius' evidence also prompts a reassessment of the 1525 Aldine Galen, and of the activities of two of its editors, John Clement and Edward Wotton. This study is of importance to students of both ancient medicine and the transmission of Greek learning in the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701192

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PREFACE

The last twenty-five years have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest in the medical writers of Antiquity. Not since the sixteenth century has there been so much attention given to the medical classics, or so much argument over the elucidation of ancient medical theories. Whole conferences have been devoted to Hippocrates, to Galen, and even to lesser Latin medical authors; and philologists, historians, and philosophers have joined physicians in investigating their medical past. Previously unknown texts, in both Greek and Latin, have appeared in print for the first time, and the greater accessibility of Arabic manuscripts has contributed to the rediscovery of several treatises by Galen and by Rufus of Ephesus which had long been thought lost.¹ Yet amid all this activity, one uncomfortable fact stands out. For the great majority of the writings of the most voluminous, and arguably the most important, medical author, Galen of Pergamum, classical scholars must still rely on an edition that is over a century and a half old and, in essence, little more than a careless reprint of a seventeenth-century edition, which is itself only occasionally superior to its Basle predecessor of 1538. Modern editions, where they exist at all, have not always been free from serious faults, for a perverse passion for the avoidance of hiatus and an overzealous attachment to hypothetical readings reconstructed from an Arabic version have brought to Galen’s Greek as much confusion as truth.² For all his failings, Karl Gottlob Kühn has not been entirely dethroned.

Since good editions of Galenic texts in Greek are not abundant, it comes as no surprise to discover that little is known about the transmission and manuscript tradition of the Galenic Corpus. There is no history of the text of Galen to set alongside the magisterial survey of Galen’s influence by Owsei Temkin,³ and few discussions of Galenic manuscripts to compare with those of the Hippocratic. Such a sweeping statement might seem at first sight unfair to Bergsträsser, Thorndike, Durling and Degen, whose pioneering investigations into the translations by, respectively, Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq and his school, Pietro d’Abano and Niccolò da Reggio, Burgundio of Pisa and Thomas Linacre, and Sergius of Resaena, have thrown much light on the way in which a knowledge of Galen and his medicine spread in both East and West.⁴ Yet, for the most part, this activity has been bibliographical rather than philological, and direct comparison between surviving Greek tracts and their versions has been rare. For all the well-merited praise of Ḥunain as a proto-philologist, none of his Arabic or Syriac translations of an existing Greek text has yet been published in full. The mediaeval Latin translators have fared little better. Only two versions by Niccolò of surviving Greek treatises have appeared in a modern critical edition – and neither is easily accessible –, and only one each by Burgundio of Pisa and Arnold of Villanova.⁵ Of their Renaissance successors, only Thomas Linacre has been accorded the honour of a detailed and critical examination.⁶ On his competitors and the manuscripts they used there is largely silence.

This lack of interest on the part of classical scholars may perhaps be explained by a prejudice against an author whose Greek was not only late but also, at times, forbiddingly technical. Yet it should not be forgotten that, as long ago as 1905, Hermann Diels and his collaborators at the Berlin Academy had furnished the student of the Galenic tradition with a priceless tool, an excellent catalogue of the manuscripts of Galen in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew.⁷ But the very success of Diels’ enterprise brought with it dangers. The apparent comprehensiveness of the catalogue, which belied the great speed with which it had been compiled, discouraged further searches for manuscripts, and there were few who suspected its weaknesses, particularly in its dating of manuscripts. Johannes Mewaldt was not alone in his belief that ‘the manuscript tradition of Galen is generally late; manuscripts of the fifteenth century are the norm’, and his dismissive judgment, enshrined in the columns of Pauly-Wissowa, gave no inducement to look further.⁸ Nor was the Renaissance fortuna of Galen attractive to those scholars who were concerned with the rediscovery of the classics in the years from Petrarch to Politian, for their eyes were fixed on more literary texts. Furthermore, the first printing of a genuine work by Galen in its original Greek was not until 1500, and of the first complete edition not until 1525, by Aldus’ son-in-law and successor, and hence they failed to attract the attention of the historians of early printing. Galen, whatever his significance for medicine, came to have little interest for philologists or historians of the classical tradition.

That there might be life after Diels was first shown by Richard Durling, whose list of additions and corrections, published in 1967, revealed a surprisingly large number of errors and omissions in the Katalog’s reporting of Latin manuscripts. Still more recently, Nigel Wilson’s investigations into the activities of the scribe Iohannikios have radically altered the dating of many Greek manuscripts, and almost reversed Mewaldt’s dictum; many tracts of Galen are preserved in manuscripts of the twelfth, not the fifteenth century.¹⁰ At the same time historians of medicine have begun to re-examine the significance of the discovery of Greek medical works for the scientific Renaissance, and to look again at the much maligned conservatives, the so-called ‘medical humanists’.¹¹ The present study combines and continues these three approaches by concentrating upon one of the medical humanists, the Englishman John Caius, and upon his search for Galenic manuscripts in Italy and England in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Caius himself published an account of his travels in De libris suis, but his reports of manuscripts in this work are often tantalisingly brief and of little value to a modern editor of the text. However, an examination of his copious marginalia, preserved at Cambridge and Eton, not only confirms his own reminiscences but also adds considerable new information in the form of notes, emendations and detailed collations of manuscripts that are either lost or, as yet, unidentified. Caius’ marginalia are impressive, not just for the immense quantity of codicological information they contain, but also for the quality of some of the readings and conjectures they report. In particular, the collations of the ‘Codex Adelphi’, whatever their source, offer significant new readings to future editors of Galen. The marginalia also help to resolve many puzzles in the printing and editorial history of Galen, as well as suggesting many new emendations, not all of them by John Caius. He himself was a competent critic, but, as his notes show, he was outclassed by John Clement and by Agostino Ricci. Finally, this study aims to bring to the attention of classicists some of the work being done on the hopes, motives and abilities of the medical humanists of the sixteenth century, and to suggest that, on this topic at least, historians of medicine and historians of the classical text can profitably learn from each other. Medicine in the sixteenth century was not confined to the improvement of anatomy, nor classical philology to literary texts.

My list of acknowledgements is necessarily long. I am grateful for advice on matters codicological to Daniela Mugnai Carrara, Michael Lowry, Michael Reeve, and Nigel Wilson, and for assistance in checking manuscripts in European libraries and in locating rare publications by local historians to Daniel Béguin, Almuth Gelpke, Jacques Jouanna, and Jutta Kollesch. My Wellcome colleagues Faye Getz and Richard Palmer often joined me in puzzling over illegible squiggles and curious abbreviations, while Robin Price helped to smooth my path to Eton. Richard Durling, Joanne Phillips, and Andrew Wear read and commented on earlier drafts of this book, as did Charles Brink, Christopher Brooke, Philip Grierson and Jeremy Prynne. Their hospitality towards a non-Caian has been as much appreciated as their criticism, advice and encouragement. It was Charles Brink who first suggested the possibility of publishing this monograph as a Supplement to the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, and I am grateful to the Society’s Editors for accepting it in that series, as well as to the Master and Fellows of Gonville and Caius College for financial help towards publication. Their Librarian, like his confreres at the Marsh Library, Dublin, the Leiden University Library, the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, Merton College, Oxford, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, the University Library, Sheffield, and the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, allowed me generous access to his books and manuscripts, and their staffs were ever courteous and helpful. Nor can I omit to thank the book-fetching staff of the Wellcome Library, for whom the daily delivery of Dr Nutton’s Galen was a heavy task always cheerfully performed, and the team of secretaries who valiantly coped with a Topsy-like manuscript. Above all, I owe a double debt of gratitude to the Provost and Fellows of Eton and to their Librarian, Paul Quarrie; first for their financial help towards publication, and secondly for their willingness to let me keep the Eton Galen on extended loan at the Wellcome Institute for the duration of my researches. Without that rare privilege, this monograph would have been far longer in the making, and its author’s patience with John Caius much reduced.

NOTES

1. Recent publications of new texts from the Arabic include: Galen, On homoeomeries, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, (CMG) Suppl. Or. 3 (1970); Rufus (?), Case-histories (1978); On jaundice (1983). Publication is expected soon of Galen’s Commentary on Airs, Waters and Places, On examining a physician, and On my own opinions.

2. The former failing vitiates Marquardt’s 1884 edition of Galen’s Scripta Minora I, and is only partly corrected by the more modern editions of the same texts by Kaibel (1893), De Boer (1937) and Barigazzi (1966). For Wenkebach’s over-reliance on the Arabic in his editions of the Galenic commentaries on the Epidemics (CMG V. 10.1-2.2, 1934-1940), see the reviews by H. Diller, Kleine Schriften zur antiken Medizin (1973) 154-63, 223-33, and B. Einarson, Class. Phil. 56 (1961) 58-63.

3. Owsei Temkin, Galenism, Rise and decline of a medical philosophy (1973).

4. G. Bergsträsser, ‘Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq, Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen’, Abh. f.d.Kunde d.Morgenlandes 17.2 (1925); ‘Neue Materialien zu Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq’s Galen-Bibliographie’, ibid. 19.2 (1932); L. Thorndike, ‘Translations of works of Galen from the Greek by Peter of Abano’, Isis 33 (1942) 649-53; ‘Translations of the works of Galen from the Greek by Niccolò da Reggio’, Byzantina Metabyzantina 1 (1946) 213-35; R. J. Durling, Burgundio of Pisa’s translation of Galen’s ‘De complexionibus’ (1976); ‘Linacre and medical humanism’, in F. Maddison, M. Pelling, C. Webster, Essays on the life and work of Thomas Linacre (1977) 76-106; R. Degen, ‘Galen im syrischen: eine Übersicht über die syrische Überlieferung der Werke Galens’, in V. Nutton, Galen: problems and prospects (1981) 131-66.

5. De consuetudinibus, ed. J. M. Schmutte, CMG Suppl. 3 (1941), most copies of which were destroyed in the war; De temporibus morborum, ed. I. Wille (1960), which is a typescript dissertation presented at the University of Kiel. For Burgundio, see Durling, Burgundio; for Arnold, De rigore, ed. M. R. McVaugh (1981).

6. Durling, Linacre.

7. H. Diels, ‘Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte, I’, Abh. Preuss. Akad. Wiss 1905. A corrected and updated list is kept at the East Berlin office of the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum.

8. J. Mewaldt, ‘Galenos’, Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft 1 (1912) 590.

9. R. J. Durling, ‘Corrigenda and addenda to Diels’ Galenica’, Traditio 23 (1967) 461-76; 37 (1981) 373-81.

10. N. G. Wilson, ‘A mysterious Byzantine scriptorium: Iohannikios and his colleagues’, Scrittura e civiltà 7 (1983) 161-76; ‘New light on Burgundio of Pisa’, Stud, it.filol. class., ser. 3.4 (1986) 113-18.

11. A. Wear, R. K. French, I. M. Lonie, The medical renaissance of the sixteenth century (1985).

I. JOHN CAIUS

The name of John Caius (1510-73) is scarcely honoured today outside the walls of the Cambridge College whose second founder he became in 1557. His ‘resolute action’ on behalf of the London College of Physicians, from 1555 almost until his death, is now derided as a flagrant abuse of privilege and status in order to deprive the poorer inhabitants of London of medical assistance that was both effective and inexpensive.¹ His many writings languish unwanted and unread, and even his admirer, Sir George Clark, found it hard to give them praise. Of English Dogges he considered ‘not notable for anything in its scientific approach and not a dog-lover’s book, but useful’, and his pioneering antiquarian studies of Cambridge were ‘not contemptible, though in parts they are cheerfully fabulous’.² Caius’ small tract on medical method, which caused feelings to run high when it was first published, has long since passed into oblivion,³ while modern medical discovery has far outdated his work on the sweating sickness, which was singled out for its accurate clinical descriptions as late as 1859.⁴ Only his championship of human anatomy as an essential part of medical education has so far saved him from the fate of the mastodon, although even here he is compared to his great disadvantage with his friend and flat-mate, Andreas Vesalius, the most influential of all Renaissance anatomists.⁵

That Caius was often a reactionary in an age of change cannot be denied. He was, in his last years, accused of being a secret Catholic, who kept ‘muche popishe trumpery’ hidden in his College rooms, and his preference for the old ways (which extended also to the pronunciation of Latin) was strengthened by his experience of unruly junior fellows and boisterous undergraduates given to games and drinking, who preferred to spend their money on fashionable clothes that would soon wear out rather than on books that would endure.⁶ He looked wistfully back to the great days of Henry VIII, a prince ‘unique in his own time for his combination of learning and virtue’, when the temples of religion had not been ravaged and when England’s ‘old manly hardnes, stoute courage & peinfulnes’ had not been sapped by a delicate taste for hot buttered toast.⁷ But in his medicine at least, he appeared to contemporaries to be in the forefront of progress. In On medical method, he was avowedly bringing to a wider public the doctrines currently being put forward in lectures by the most famous medical professor, Giovanni Battista Da Monte, at the most famous medical university of the day, Padua. Scholars awaited the publications of Caius’ editions and translations of Galen with enthusiasm, and his description of the sweating sickness found an appreciative audience even at the court of the Sultan.⁸ He corresponded on the friendliest of terms with the greatest naturalist of his age, Conrad Gesner of Zurich, and his anatomical lectures before the London surgeons, in which he revealed ‘the hidden iuelles and precious threasours’ of Galen, earned him the approving title of ‘the seconde Linacar’.⁹

In the context of the 1540s and the 1550s, with which this essay will be mostly concerned, Caius was in no way old-fashioned in his belief in the supremacy of the classical physicians over their Arabic and mediaeval successors. The leading physicians of his generation were medical humanists almost to a man. There might be disagreements over what authors should best be followed, and over the extent to which the rediscovery of the original Greek texts of Galen had removed the need to refer to Arabic intermediaries such as Avicenna, but until the Paracelsian revival of the 1560s, there was no obvious alternative to the Galenic and Hippocratic tradition other than folk medicine and pure empiricism.¹⁰ Even the Arabists acknowledged the superiority of the Greeks in medical theory and in diagnosis,¹¹ while the three medical writers who traditionally have been seen as revolutionary figures and the precursors of modern medicine, Vesalius, Fracastoro and Pare, were far from rejecting their classical heritage. Vesalius (1514-64) denied many of the fundamental claims of Galenic anatomy, yet in their place he set what he believed was a restored ‘prisca medicina’ of Hippocrates and the Alexandrians.¹² Fracastoro’s theories of contagion, which he expounded at length in 1546, were based, at least in part, on Lucretius, and they proved acceptable to his contempories precisely because of the ease with which they could be assimilated into a Galenic framework.¹³ Even Pare (1510-90), the legendary poor boy made good, explained and justified his empirical observation of the correct way to treat gunshot wounds in terms that had long been standard. His challenge was less to the method of treatment of such wounds than to the erroneous classification