On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

devised day by day that seemed much truer and better than those that had been handed down from the discipline of the ancients. Consequently, the studies of the ancients who had treated natural questions withered, and they themselves were buried in a certain oblivion, since few wished to occupy themselves with them, and no one wished to inhabit them. Galen met the same fate. For in the seventeenth century, to say nothing of individual pamphlets published separately in either Greek or Latin, only one edition was sent into the light, the edition comprising all the works of Galen that have become known, by René Chartier of Vendôme, Paris 1683, in Greek and Latin, which, as was understood later, satisfied the expectation of scholars not at allD. Ruhnken, in Timaeus' Lexicon of Platonic Words, p. 96 (2nd ed., Leiden 1789), complains that a certain Platonic passage in the Chartier edition is miserably corrupt, and argues that he introduced nearly infinite errors into Galen under the guise of emending them. Koehler, in the Preface to his edition of the Protrepticus, p. 9, judges as follows: 'A precious and sufficiently splendid edition, of which, however, I think little honorably. — Against Minerva's will, he amended or rather overturned the reading in many places.'. Through the following century, studies of Galen lay completely idle; for nothing was published except a few booksOn the Diagnosis and Cure of the Affections of the Soul, ed. J. H. Acker, Rudolstadt and Jena 1715; Protrepticus to the Arts, published separately by J. G. G. Koehler, Leipzig 1778; That the Best Physician is also a Philosopher, ed. Curt Sprengel, Halle 1788. Furthermore, the British published the Protrepticus more than once in the 18th century.. Finally, in our own century, the Kuehn edition appeared, separated from the Chartier by an interval of nearly one hundred and fifty yearsThe Complete Works of Claudius Galen. Edition managed by C. G. Kuehn. 22 Vols. Leipzig, 1821–1833., which, although I do not judge that all its virtues should be denied, nevertheless, as to the great flaws by which it suffers—as all who are intent on Galen’s books and use this edition complain todayCf., to mention one, J. Marquardt in Critical Observations on Cl. Galen's book On the Affections and Errors of the Soul, Leipzig 1870, p. 9.—it has been demonstrated by me and in two academic programsCritical Questions on the Books of Galen on the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato. Erlangen 1871. Second Specimen of Questions, Erlangen 1872. here and there, and will be demonstrated more accurately later. But just as not only before the Chartier edition