On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

but one must divine what is the true hand of the writer; and how difficult this is, is proven—to mention this one thing—by those same passages copied by Galen from Chrysippus, regarding which it can most often be vehemently doubted whether their obscurity is owed to the writer himself, whose negligence in writing is well-known, or to the fault of the scribes. Finally, this also contributed the greatest difficulty to the perfection of my work: that I, as the only one in human memory to be engaged in treating this work of Galen, have hardly found anyone before me who had either judged the text according to critical principles or contributed much to the explanation of the whole work or of individual passages; and as for anyone who had diligently observed Galen's style of speaking, I found no one, so that I seemed to myself not unlike a man sitting alone in a small boat and steering it on a vast and immense ocean filled with reefs and crags.

Reflecting on these and such things, I certainly have cause for fear that if this edition falls into the hands of men, they might judge that I have taken upon my shoulders a burden greater than they could bear. Yet I sustain myself with the consciousness that I do not consider my labor and study to have been spent in vain. For who will be so fastidious that, since previously those who unrolled and treated this or that passage of Galen were completely uncertain about the truth of the reading, he would not rejoice that now an opportunity has been given to discern what is to be attributed to the manuscripts and what to the editors? Or who would be so unfair as to be unwilling, by comparing my edition with that of Kuehn Carl Gottlob Kühn, an earlier editor of Galen, to recognize how much the emendation of corrupted passages has now progressed? I have deemed that the text of Kuehn must be corrected in more than one thousand eight hundred places; let the fair judges of these matters see how rightly. Therefore, although I see that there is a certain breed of men today who, if editors have erred in anything, probe and chastise most bitterly, but if any virtue or merit is present, suppress it with most arrogant silence, I nevertheless trust that this work of mine will not be disapproved by those who use fair judgment. Although even these