De Plenitudine (review)

The brief treatise under review here is hardly to be numbered among the major works of Galen, but it does possess a certain interest of its own. The deceptively simple title, Peri plethous—or De plenitudine, as it is often referred to in Latin, Über die Fülle in Dr. Otte's edition, or, in plain English, "On Fullness"—conceals the fact that a very technical kind of "fullness" or "repletion" is the subject dealt with in this medical/philosophical/logical essay. (One must not forget that medicine, if the sharpest, is not the only arrow in Galen's remarkable quiver.) What, then, is the "plethos" of Galen's title? The reference is to various harmful superfluities, of differing compositions in different cases, found occurring (according to Galen) in a wide variety of bodily "parts" including flesh and skin, arteries and veins, internal organs, and bones. As one would expect, the four humors make more than one appearance here. (Those who would smile at such theories might keep in mind, on the one hand, that Galen was working without knowledge of the circulation of the blood or of modern chemistry, and on the other, that, to take one example, Sir Christopher Wren [1632-1723], more than two millennia after the first appearance of the "humors," still thought it worthwhile to experiment on dogs by removing their spleens in order to observe whether or not they still produced black bile.)

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