Since you are knowledgable in that matter, could you comment on the following narrative (I have heard it several times, but can't point to a specific source).
Before the Renaissance, there was a very strong scientific tradition in Europe (especially in catholic church, which hosted most of European science in these days) that you were supposed follow the ancient sages like Aristotle. You were allowed to re-interpret them, but not to extend past their knowledge/understanding, and you were supposed to not question them.
With Renaissance (and even more, with enlightenment), a lot of people started seeing this as a bug, not a feature. They began to question the ancient authorities. One of their methods (perhaps as part of a cultural war? I don't know) was to make up really bad stories about everything associated with the old tradition that preceded Renaissance . This included in particular old science (Galen?), the middle ages (the name "Dark Ages" switched its meaning to "intellectual darkness" about that time), and the catholic church.
So they invented a lot of stories that were either plainly wrong ("There was no technical advancement in the middle ages") or so distorted that they sounded horrible ("Galilei had a brilliant scientific insight, but Catholic church opposed science and suppressed him"). Since they were the winners, the stories maintained, and except for knowledgable historians, they became Common Knowledge.
I am inclined to believe the narrative, but I am not sure. It's probably quite simplified. But then I share your impression that a lot of Things We All Know about middle ages in Europe are wrong, and this wrongness seems to go quite systematically into the same direction (middle ages were horrible, Church was Evil). I am sure that there are a lot of wrong Things We All Know about other topics, but I don't have the feeling that it's so systematic or runs so deep.
There's a few significantly different issues around here.
The people we now call the "Renaissance" (mainly Tuscan humanists of the 15th century) had some revolutions in art and philosophy, as well as beginning the translation and study of Ancient humanist texts, but they often erase the "Renaissance of the 12th Century" in which Ancient scientific texts were revived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century
Rene Descartes criticizes the Scholastic philosophers of the 16th century as just doing epicycles on Aristotle, while he is the first person to think truly new thoughts - and his work was influential enough that the history of philosophy is often taught that way. (Students are required to take a class on "Ancient philosophy" and a class on "Modern philosophy", which usually means Descartes to Kant, as well as contemporary philosophy, but Medieval is usually purely optional.)
The "Dark Ages" refers most specifically to the period from the 5th to 8th century in Europe, when Germanic kingdoms took over the various parts of western Roman territory, but the ruling class didn't keep written records of things until Charlemagne. There's not much evidence that this period was that much worse for people in any way - just worse for historians who like written records.
So there's a lot more complexity to these rules - the Renaissance thinkers were actually much more into hero worship of the Ancients than the people that preceded them. But there's also usually a lot more continuity between each period and its immediate predecessors and successors than the self-told stories really make clear.
I see. So it's probably not true that medieval scholars focused more on tradition and ancient texts than Renaissance. In some sense, this should be obvious, it's in the very name "Renaissance". Nevertheless, I have heard this claim several times, so I still wonder where it comes from.
As far as I get it, the "Renaissance of the 12th Century" was in fact only one of several medieval Renaissances. It seems more like it went in and outside of fashion several times, and the standard "Renaissance" was only one such wave.
For the term "Dark Ages", I disagree. I do agree that among historians, it means "period with few record". But that is not how the general public uses it, and I would claim that even non-historian intellectuals don't use it that way. According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography), the idea of intellectually "Dark Middle Ages" became popular during Enlightenment (though it existed earlier), and the idea remained so strong over centuries that historians eventually stopped using the term because readers kept on misunderstanding it. (Also, by the same source the restriction of the term to Early Middle Ages came much later, in 19th and 20th century.)
Renaissance scholars tended to hero worship the ancients such as Plato (thus we refer to scholarship as "research" rather than "search" because the assumption was that the ancients knew it all and we just have to recover their learning) and criticize medieval scribes who made less that wholly faithful copies of the ancient originals.
During the Renaissance (perhaps especially after the invention of the printing press in the 1450s), scholars noticed that they often had more than one version of ancient texts due to imperfect copying by subsequent scribes. Critical methods had to be invented to figure out what the original text most likely said. From there, criticism continued to expand as a habit of mind. This growing critical spirit is noteworthy in distinguishing the last 600 years in the West from the intellectual framework of other times and places.
There's an old SSC post where Scott looks at this issue and rejects both the thesis that the Medieval Era was an undifferentiated time when everyone in Europe had the plague and spent their whole lives covered in mud, and the antithesis that the end of Antiquity was barely noticed by anyone outside of a small literati.
When did Galen finally go out of fashion? Wikipedia says humorism fell out of fashion in the 1850s:
"Humourism began to fall out of favor in the 1850s with the advent of Germ theory which was able to show that many diseases previously thought to be humoural were in fact caused by pathogens."
> Nature takes on the exact same role in his arguments that evolution would take on in ours:
> “Your school of medicine says that the ureters don’t do anything? Then why are they there? We know that this animal was created by Nature, why would she include these structures if they were truly useless?”
I mean, you could also substitute in "God" here. Saying that Nature wouldn't be wasteful isn't any more of an explanation than that would be; I don't think it's worth giving any credit for this. (And of course, on occasion, nature *is* wasteful...)
Fair enough, but I suppose my point was vestigial things in general, for example how some humans are born with "throwback" tails or an extra finger. I just get a little white knuckle about the "intelligent design" implication here.
There are definitely "intelligent design" vibes, but it doesn't strike me as all that wrong to think this way from an evolutionary perspective. Nature *isn't* wasteful--it's just not efficient. People evolved fingers for a reason, and having an extra one is just an indication that the formation process went a bit awry. "Divine creation" proponents historically had more trouble explaining such things in themselves, preferring to say "God gives us our burdens to bear, to teach us humility," etc.
Galen probably didn't know about the appendix, since pigs don't have them, and Wikipedia says the first recorded appendectomy was in the 18th century CE
It's an argument that experience shows to be worth *something*, but which, taken as an absolute, rests on the Aristotelian teleological framework, which showed itself ultimately fallacious. Another reason why Galen got "cancelled" in Cartesian times (... and then of course later developments showed that nature sometimes does behave, in some specific ways and contexts, *as if it had* a purpose; natural selection here, law of least action there (but one has to be careful not to overstate the extent to which this can be true)).
<i>It's an argument that experience shows to be worth *something*, but which, taken as an absolute, rests on the Aristotelian teleological framework, which showed itself ultimately fallacious.</i>
Though I can't help but notice that claims of Aristotle's fallaciousness are generally very similar to claims of Galen's stupidity -- in both cases, people don't show more than an extremely shallow acquaintance with the original sources (if they show any acquaintance at all), nor do they stop to consider how such an alleged idiot was able to amass the kind of following he did.
Well, Aristotle's views were reasonable enough; why expect a mechanistic world-view to impose itself in an era before machines? Everyday intuition came from interactions with living beings, many of which clearly have a sense of purpose.
I read a very interesting paper by a physicist which examined Aristotle's actual theories and concluded that they were a fairly good, nonintuitive description of motion in fluids. I think that this link is it:
Teleology is an inescapable feature of the world; the question is whether you want to locate it in objects themselves, like Aristotle thought, or whether you think it's imposed on them by God, like the mechanists did.
Like I said, "An extremely shallow acquaintance with the original sources". To take but one example, "All natural bodies and magnitudes we hold to be, as such, capable of locomotion" doesn't, despite the fisker's bluster, contradict "the geometric description of motion is accidental, not essential". It's the ability to move (or be moved) which Aristotle thinks belongs to natural bodies and magnitudes by nature, not the precise form which this movement takes.
Aristotle does think the precise form must be a combination of linear & circular, and it's THAT which Dutch insists is "accidental" rather than essential.
So he does, my bad. Though since he also says that "Yes, you can describe all motion as a compound of linear and circular motion", I'm not sure why he thinks Aristotle made a massive howler in saying exactly the same thing.
My impression is that either Aristotle was not as great of a prose stylist as Plato was (whose dialogues remain highly readable after 2400 years), or that much of what we have of Aristotle's are lecture notes written up by his students from their notes. Also, whatever Aristotle wrote in dialogue form hasn't come down to us, which is an unfortunate loss because dialogues tend to be more fun to read.
I'd frame this as: yes, teleology as applied to the products of evolution is an imperfect heuristic. But relative to the state of medical science in Galen's time it was pretty darn powerful and accurate, and it sounds like he got a lot of mileage out of it. One can say "modern science shouldn't operate on teleological heuristics" without faulting him for his approach.
> I mean, you could also substitute in "God" here. Saying that Nature wouldn't be wasteful isn't any more of an explanation than that would be; I don't think it's worth giving any credit for this. (And of course, on occasion, nature *is* wasteful...)
It's not really an explanation; it's something far more valuable: a belief that (relatively) consistently pays rent in valid predictions. It's predictions are (as you say) wrong on occasion, but they're far more often right.
This is especially true on the organ scale, which is all Galen had access to confirm its predictions. Organs are enormously expensive to evolve, and so are literally never evolved without a purpose (and very rarely lose that purpose without being coopted for something useful anyhow.)
Indeed, Galen's principle here was generally more accurate in its predictions than pre-1950s evolutionary theory. The recognition of the possibility of vestigial organs led to far more erroneous predictions of vestigiality than correct ones.
It is an explanation though. It's not a good one compared to the explanations we have available today, but it's a theory that distinguishes the world we live in (where most parts of most living things have some purpose) from a very large number of worlds we don't live in (where it's normal for living things to have lots of pointless organs).
A great review. One comment: Bacon was writing during the time when William Harvey was trying to disprove Galen's model of circulation and encountering a lot of resistance. Maybe Galen got cancelled by Harvey partisans, or just acquired a bad reputation for being on the wrong side of this argument?
> “Nature”, described in this way, ends up sounding a lot like evolution. Of course, Galen had no concept of evolution, but it’s very interesting to see that he was using a functionally equivalent concept hundreds of years before Darwin. It’s not clear if this is a concept he developed himself or if he inherited it from some earlier thinker, but clearly someone, in looking at biology, noticed that the principle “everything exists for a purpose” was a pretty good starting place for making arguments that turned out to be true.
I don't know whether it was the earliest, but I know of an earlier thinker who basically invented survival of the fittest way before Darwin (okay, admittedly without all the details): Empedocles (a Pre-Socratic philosopher)
"He knew that there is sex in plants, and he had a theory (somewhat fantastic, it must be admitted)
of evolution and the survival of the fittest. Originally, "countless tribes of mortal creatures were
scattered abroad endowed with all manner of forms, a wonder to behold." There were heads
without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without foreheads, solitary limbs seeking for union.
These things joined together as each might chance; there were shambling creatures with countless
hands, creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions, creatures with the bodies of
oxen and the faces of men, and others with the faces of oxen and the bodies of men. There were
hermaphrodites combining the natures of men and women, but sterile. In the end, only certain
forms survived. "
(Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy)
Super interesting, easy to read, humorous (heh heh) -- and not an idea I would have had, to review a book by an ancient author and compare what he actually said with what it's often claimed he did.
I wasn't interested in reading the reviews at all -- "no one ever picks books I'd be interested in, and few have the touch that makes a review enlightening *and* entertaining; hmph", thought I -- but this changed my mind. Thanks for this, anonymous reviewer!
Hm, do you think Scott's book reviews make your cut? For consistent enlightertainment (making that word up) I think his reviews are rarely surpassed; usually it's one or the other: https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/book-review/
I find book reports a hard sell when I tell people about SSC/ASX, but frankly I think this aspect is one of the freshest and most interesting things the Internet has to offer in <current year>.
I really enjoyed this. It was lively, engaging, thoughtful and intelligently written. Quite Scott-esque at times.
I read it too fast because I wanted to get to the end so I could comment, but I'll read it again at a more leisurely pace and I'm already looking forward to the prospect.
I understand that in Galen's time, Alexandria was the place to go to learn medicine, because they didn't mind cutting up dead bodies at the med school there.
For a similar reasons, it is surmised that Galen took a job doctoring up gladiators because it gave him a more...hands on insight into human anatomy and how it worked.
Of course, Aristotle was way off on a lot of things, but he was considered an authority for longer than Galen was.
Really good book review. Make me aware of a book I should be interested in, tell me where you're going with this and why you're reviewing it, then make good on all those promises. I feel like I know a lot more than I did before. I also really appreciate going back and reading a foundational text rather than just something new and modern and trendy (not that there's anything wrong with the latter, just that we don't get enough of the former).
"All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.”
Without context, the above can easily be interpreted as mockably fallacious. But Galen was talking - whether he was right or wrong - about a specific medicine, not proposing a logical syllogism. There is a factor which is potentially empirically relevant, i.e. the short recovery time after drinking.
Consider, for example, the Heimlich manoeuvre. Surely that operates in just such a fashion? Those who can be helped by it are helped immediately. Those who cannot will die. Defibrillation is another example. There is no reason in principle why it should not be the case for a drug also.
One can quibble about the details - yes, for example, a tracheostomy might work, but might not be a practical solution if medical professionals are not present. And perhaps use of the word 'obvious' is too strong. My point is that the criticisms of Galen's wording are implicitly attributing to him a major, not minor, fallacy - and there is no strong reason to believe this major fallacy was present.
I guess it just still seems like a fallacy to me. There's a big difference between "either it cures you quickly or you die" and "if this doesn't cure you, you're incurable". You can say the first thing of the Heimlich manoeuvre, or defibrillation, and plausibly you can say it of this medicine. I don't think you can say the second thing of any of the three, and if you wanted to try you'd need to bring in some reason to think it.
I guess if you tried to translate the first thing into a logical proposition "for all person, (sick(person) and given-medicine(person)) => (cured-quickly(person) or dies-quickly(person))", it implies the second thing, but... I dunno, "you're going to die soon" feels like it has an implied "given our current knowledge and abilities", where "you're incurable" feels like it explicitly denies that extra clause.
(Clarifying here that there seems to be no particular reason to think Galen ever made this mistake, and this is an epistemological point rather than a point in favor or against Galen. Not accusing you of thinking otherwise, just seems worth being explicit to help avoid readers losing track of context.)
Um, but it now occurs to me that trying to read such implications across thousands of years and at least one translator seems... risky. So I guess my previous comments need to be tempered in that light.
I laughed with our Author's admission that this juicy word choice made them "very uncomfortable". I then noticed that they simply gave us the straight, even unremarkable, phenomenologic truth. We all feel the discomfort. So why laugh?
"It's funny because it's true" - this explains a lot of Rationalist humor - which I admire, to be clear. A lot of humor, if not all, also elucidates, e.g. draws to a punchline, a contradiction. Perhaps this kind of frankness is funny because it is true, and because it reminds us that we live in a world of degraded discourse where writers so often obfuscate, lie, hide the simple truth. The contradiction instantly elucidated, then, is this Comedic Situation: a humble truth-teller in a loud lying world.
Outstanding! 5/5 in style, I would believe this was written by Scott, maybe just a bit more succinct. I think you steelman Galen a bit too much however, the "evolution" section was a bit too laughable. Don't give the guy points for sounding like he knows what he's talking about, stick to praising his empirical heuristics.
Meh – I think it's perfectly fair (and better overall) to "give the guy points for sounding like he knows what he's talking about".
The detailed history of the development of the theory of natural selection, or any major scientific theory, sure makes it seem like a long period of people "sounding like [they know] what [they're] talking about" before the final recognizable theory is described (and then, often much later, confirmed).
And a lot of scientific theorizing would similarly seem like 'giving people points for sounding like they know what they're talking about' based on your implied standards – take special relativity as another example. Others had, e.g. already derived the relevant mathematics, before Einstein wrapped it all up in an explanation that we all now agree is palatable.
The history of mathematics, physics, chemistry, is _riddled_ with people 'sounding like they know what they're talking about'. Yes, they mostly weren't producing 'good' scientific theories, for all kinds of reasons, but I think of that as the (probably inevitable) manner in which people 'locate a hypothesis in hypothesis space'.
This is pretty inconsequential, but I have an interesting thought about this anyway:
"reports that corn will spontaneously draw water out of nearby earthen jars and increase in weight, which I’m pretty sure is not true."
Actually, this seems plausible to me. Earthen jars tend to be somewhat porous and they were probably not glazed, so water being stored in them will slowly evaporate over the course of weeks or months. By "corn" he was surely not referring to the yellow vegetable you eat off the cob, because corn is native to Central America and was not introduced into Europe until the Colombian Exchange. I am not totally sure, but I think the antiquated meaning of "corn" was closer to that of "cereal" or "flour". And it seems plausible to me that flour can absorb water vapor out of humid air.
So if you store a bunch of water and flour next to each other inside non-watertight earthen jars in your basement, the water will evaporate out of the water jars and some will absorb into the flour, making it heaver.
> When Europeans say “corn”, it’s a general term for any grain or cereal crop, including wheat, barley, millet, sorghum, oats and rye. These are native to the Old World, and the Romans would have cultivated or at least known about them.
"Corn" in European context refers to wheat (mostly), oats, barley and other cereals. When maize was introduced from the New World, it was known as "Indian corn" or "yellow meal" when ground.
Purchased as an emergency food supply during the Famine, it became known as "Peel's Brimstone" because of its yellow colour, and due to people not knowing how to mill and cook it properly:
"Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be "very much" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as "Peel's brimstone"."
"As chairman, Routh worked hard to counter the initial resistance to Indian corn, derisively dubbed ‘Peel’s brimstone’ because of its sulphurous yellow colour. The hard, unpalatable grain was far removed from the diet of potatoes to which the rural poor had become accustomed and, if not boiled for long enough, the alien foodstuff could cause painful indigestion and, in some cases, dysentery.
Routh become a public advocate of its use and benefits, overseeing the publication of thousands of instructional handbills and a popular pamphlet with instructions for its preparation. The resistance, however, was short-lived. In the words of the unfortunately-named commissary general, Sir Edward Pine-Coffin, in a letter to Trevelyan on 30 March 1846, the Indian meal was ‘much too good a thing to be long rejected by starving people’.
In practice, the Relief Commission was hindered by internal disagreements and Trevelyan’s rigorous oversight and the public works schemes were beset by bureaucratic delays and inefficiencies. Nonetheless, the relief measures devised by Peel succeeded in averting many deaths.
As Isaac Butt pronounced in the Dublin University Magazine in April 1847, ‘the timely precaution [of importing Indian corn] and the subsequent judicious distribution of this store had the effect of bringing the people through the winter that closed the year 1845.’"
Fantastic. Finalist #2 has done an impressive job of capturing Scott's book review style, and I can't pay a much higher compliment than that.
I think touches like doing the extra legwork to research the historical context of the writer and not just the work itself are what really push it over the edge into exceptional. One signature move of Scott's is to relay some amusing, often absurd-sounding anecdote found in the writing of the piece, and the bit on Galen having to write a dedicated piece to combat the various imitators and servants pawning off his letters is EXACTLY that. It adds humor to the piece, depth and context to the work's author, and really underscores the depth of research put into the review.
Of course, the overall review itself is also written in a super readable style and the flow is very logical and smoothly laid out. This is going to be a really high bar to clear given how well it manages to match our host's style. Then again, in true transhumanist fashion, we should hope for and demand Super Scott from one of the remaining 12 entries, perhaps?
> "You know, reading about Galen reminded me of someone… a physician… trained all around the world… a prolific writer… constantly drawn into disputes about philosophy and empirical practice… who am I thinking of…"
Am I just being really dense, and is this obvious to everyone? I was thinking Maimonides, but maybe it is Locke, or Schweitzer. Or is he talking about Fauci?
> "If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour..."
I've noticed this before in ancient Greek works, but it's still striking that to them—at least if the translations are apt—change was considered a type of motion, while in our culture we more usually consider motion a type of change (a change in place).
And I wonder when this changed, and whether there is a particular reason that it had to.
(A lot of the apparent weirdness in Greek philosophy is mostly from just having conventional translations that have different connotations, so it might just be a thing that didn't leave the Greek language, but I don't know how it is in modern Greek.)
To me, change as motion implies smooth, gradual change through intermediate states, just like motion in space. As opposed to a sharp, qualitative 'step' change.
So for example, any two colors can be connected by a gradient of color change. And when objects change color over time, e.g. ripening fruit, they display some intermediate colors.
On the other hand, when water boils into steam, there's no apparent intermediate state between the two.
Our senses are finite and imprecise, and before modern instruments and modern physics, one could make an argument that either kind of change of fundamental and the other one arises from it.
So maybe all change is gradual, and water-into-steam is just so fast that the quantity of matter in the hypothetical state between water and steam is very small and short-lived, and we can't observe it directly because of all the bubbling.
Or maybe all change is qualitative, and when an apple seems to go from green to red over time, it's really a mix of very many very small pieces of matter which individually transition from pure green to pure red, but we only perceive the overall color of the mix as the proportion of green to red pieces changes.
> On the other hand, when water boils into steam, there's no apparent intermediate state between the two.
Having observed some boiling water – and maybe being a contrarian mood! – I'm not sure what this means.
I recognize that this is the accepted 'cartoon physics', and phase transitions _are_ a thing, but it also doesn't really match observations!
At the macroscopic human scale from which most people ever have or will observe water boiling, there sure seem to be LOTs of 'apparent intermediate states' between non-boiling water and boiling water. One reason being that there are many varieties, or intermediate states, of 'boiling'!
The closets thing to "no apparent intermediate state", for boiling water, that I think could be observed (by a person, with their unaided senses) is something like boiling (distilled) water in a microwave (e.g. "superheated exploding water"). All of the other more typical means of boiling water (most of which is NOT distilled) look very much like they involved a whole continuum of intermediate states.
And I would bet that these ancient intellectuals could easily understand 'phase transitions'. For one, I'd expect most of them to know about routs in battle and that's pretty obviously a phenomena where small intermediate states, at one level, result in a drastic and sudden qualitative change at a higher one (i.e. larger scale).
When the water is partially boiled, it isn't in a semi-steam state; rather some of it is still water and some of it is steam. You can clearly see bubbles of steam within the liquid.
Yes, I understand that. That's the modern understanding!
My point is that, if you (yourself) observe, e.g. a pot of boiling water, it isn't obvious that "partially boiled" isn't an intermediate state. We can't observe the individual water molecules with our eyes. But even if we could, we couldn't _perfectly_ separate all of the water molecules into 'water' or 'steam'.
Part of the 'problem' is that 'liquid' and 'gas' don't make sense as descriptions of individual molecules. They're both (necessarily) applicable only to (fairly large) ensembles or collections of molecules.
And, even in water at thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, some (tiny) amount of the liquid water is 'boiling' off of its surface. And, similarly, some (tiny) amount of steam condenses back into liquid water too, even during boiling.
There _is_ a 'sharp' phase transition, but it doesn't occur at an obviously visible scale. And I think the 'modern understanding' obfuscates a lot of the (interesting) details of what's going on in what we can observe ourselves with our own faculties. When you boil a pot of water on your stove, only a very small portion of the volume 'boils'. So the volume of water – the visible thing we can observe with our eyes over the span of seconds, minutes, and hours – doesn't itself, as a whole, undergo a rapid phase transition. The phase transition happens at much smaller scales, e.g. the bubbles of steam visible in the pot of water. That seems to me like a much more interesting, and complicated, phenomena than _strictly_ emphasizing the 'phase transition' between liquid and gas.
I disagree that the sharp phase transition isn't obvious. I can't see individual molecules, but as you note liquid and gas are descriptions of collections of molecules. And those I can see!
I think I'm thinking of this as what's reasonable to _expect_ for people that don't already have our modern understanding of the states of matter and the relevant phase transitions among them.
But I think it's hard to appreciate how non-obvious something like 'bubbles in boiling water are pockets of gaseous water inside the larger volume of liquid'.
When you pour boiling (or near boiling) water on coffee grounds, you'll observe bubbles, but the grounds aren't being sublimated, or melted and then boiled – there is pre-existing gas escaping.
And I'm struggling to think how someone could figure out the difference between the two without most of our modern understanding.
A big general problem is that, for any ontology, Nature is perfectly content 'crossing levels' (or ontologies).
Any intuitions we have about mundane boiling of pots of water is inextricably complicated by small details, e.g. the drastic difference in the behavior of boiling ('impure') water in a pot on a stove versus superheating distilled water in a microwave.
Most people, with whatever (partial) understanding modern scientific theories have provided them, consider the messy 'real world' examples, whereas the scientific theories much more accurately describe 'contrived' experiments like the superheated exploding microwave water. The latter is a much better macroscopic example of a phase transition!
<i>“Nature”, described in this way, ends up sounding a lot like evolution. Of course, Galen had no concept of evolution, but it’s very interesting to see that he was using a functionally equivalent concept hundreds of years before Darwin. It’s not clear if this is a concept he developed himself or if he inherited it from some earlier thinker, but clearly someone, in looking at biology, noticed that the principle “everything exists for a purpose” was a pretty good starting place for making arguments that turned out to be true.</i>
I don't know who originated the argument, but Aristotle was fond of saying that "nature does nothing in vain".
I suspect this idea of nature is a lot like other pre-scientific principles – and it seems like this was also a (mostly) necessary ingredient in developing what we now think of as 'scientific theories'.
Relativity – the general pre-scientific principle that Einstein kinda just _assumed_ for the sake of his argument for Special Relativity – always seemed like a similarly philosophical or metaphysical stance that wasn't (and couldn't have been) 'scientific'.
This was an unexpectedly enjoyable piece about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, props to the author! But... if I had one nit to pick it's that they seem a little more credulous of Galen's perspective vis-a-vis his critics than is maybe wise. Anyone who adopts a beleaguered, surrounded-by-fools stance in describing their critics raises the question of "is this guy a lone voice of sanity in the wilderness, or is he just setting up strawmen to knock down?" Given that we don't have writings from his contemporaries to cross-check against, it seems like we're potentially committing the same error against them--trusting someone who says "check out this idiot, how can anyone believe something so stupid!"--as we were originally against Galen.
I totally agree. I read the first entry and was amazed by the review, and thought that this might be my winner. After the second one, I already have no idea how to decide because both are amazing in their own way. Awesome work!
I always thought that Moliere's satirical line about how a sleeping medicine worked due to its dormitive virtue seemed a little harsh: the term "dormitive virtue" can be seen as a placeholder for some precise mechanism that will be discovered in the future. Perhaps 17th Century France, however, didn't have much sense of scientific progress, so my reaction that "well of course scientists will eventually figure out how this medicine's dormitive virtue works" would not have been natural to Moliere.
> As much as modern authors like to describe the humors as imaginary, Galen routinely talks about them as if he were actually collecting and measuring them!
I think it's not so much that the humors themselves are imaginary—they were referring to actual bodily fluids—but the way they classified them does not match any way that we classify bodily fluids today, and accordingly the properties ascribed to those groupings aren't necessarily going to correspond to anything we would recognize.
If I call several unrelated fluids 'phlegm' my ideas of how 'phlegm' works as a category can be anywhere from inaccurate to magical.
I read something many years ago, and unfortunately I have no idea how to find it again.
There was a doctor in the early 20th century who had some blood in a sealed test tube. After a while the components of the blood settled out, forming four distinct layers. The doctor understood what had happened in modern terms, but he also figured he had discovered what the ancients were looking at when they talked out the four humors.
This makes me wonder about something else: if what we call blood is actually mix of all four humors, how is bloodletting supposed to correct an imbalance?
> This makes me wonder about something else: if what we call blood is actually mix of all four humors, how is bloodletting supposed to correct an imbalance?
Blood being a mix of all four humors wouldn't require it to be an _equal_ mix of all four humors. If there's disproportionately more of some humor, it would reduce that humor's proportion accordingly.
If my blood is uniformly 26% phlegm, and you draw some of my blood, both your sample and my remaining blood will remain 26% phlegm. Maybe they thought it wasn't uniform, though? Maybe different parts of the body had different proportions?
The proportion within your blood would be unchanged, yes, but it would affect the amount in your body considered as a sum.
(I suppose I am taking it as assumed that the imbalance in question is one in the body as a whole, and that bloodletting was thus used for issues that weren't necessarily in the blood per se; I admit I don't know offhand if this is actually how the theory would be applied.)
As far as I know, it is true (at least in the opinion of the original physician):
"Robin Fåhræus (1921), a Swedish physician who devised the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, suggested that the four humours were based upon the observation of blood clotting in a transparent container. When blood is drawn in a glass container and left undisturbed for about an hour, four different layers can be seen. A dark clot forms at the bottom (the 'black bile'). Above the clot is a layer of red blood cells (the 'blood'). Above this is a whitish layer of white blood cells (the 'phlegm'). The top layer is clear yellow serum (the 'yellow bile')."
Fåhræus goes on to point out that the relative amounts of the four 'fluids' differ in samples from a healthy person and a person with bacterial pneumonia. From this sort of observation, he argues, you can see why Galen might have found humorism convincing.
Since you are knowledgable in that matter, could you comment on the following narrative (I have heard it several times, but can't point to a specific source).
Before the Renaissance, there was a very strong scientific tradition in Europe (especially in catholic church, which hosted most of European science in these days) that you were supposed follow the ancient sages like Aristotle. You were allowed to re-interpret them, but not to extend past their knowledge/understanding, and you were supposed to not question them.
With Renaissance (and even more, with enlightenment), a lot of people started seeing this as a bug, not a feature. They began to question the ancient authorities. One of their methods (perhaps as part of a cultural war? I don't know) was to make up really bad stories about everything associated with the old tradition that preceded Renaissance . This included in particular old science (Galen?), the middle ages (the name "Dark Ages" switched its meaning to "intellectual darkness" about that time), and the catholic church.
So they invented a lot of stories that were either plainly wrong ("There was no technical advancement in the middle ages") or so distorted that they sounded horrible ("Galilei had a brilliant scientific insight, but Catholic church opposed science and suppressed him"). Since they were the winners, the stories maintained, and except for knowledgable historians, they became Common Knowledge.
I am inclined to believe the narrative, but I am not sure. It's probably quite simplified. But then I share your impression that a lot of Things We All Know about middle ages in Europe are wrong, and this wrongness seems to go quite systematically into the same direction (middle ages were horrible, Church was Evil). I am sure that there are a lot of wrong Things We All Know about other topics, but I don't have the feeling that it's so systematic or runs so deep.
There's a few significantly different issues around here.
The people we now call the "Renaissance" (mainly Tuscan humanists of the 15th century) had some revolutions in art and philosophy, as well as beginning the translation and study of Ancient humanist texts, but they often erase the "Renaissance of the 12th Century" in which Ancient scientific texts were revived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century
Rene Descartes criticizes the Scholastic philosophers of the 16th century as just doing epicycles on Aristotle, while he is the first person to think truly new thoughts - and his work was influential enough that the history of philosophy is often taught that way. (Students are required to take a class on "Ancient philosophy" and a class on "Modern philosophy", which usually means Descartes to Kant, as well as contemporary philosophy, but Medieval is usually purely optional.)
The "Dark Ages" refers most specifically to the period from the 5th to 8th century in Europe, when Germanic kingdoms took over the various parts of western Roman territory, but the ruling class didn't keep written records of things until Charlemagne. There's not much evidence that this period was that much worse for people in any way - just worse for historians who like written records.
So there's a lot more complexity to these rules - the Renaissance thinkers were actually much more into hero worship of the Ancients than the people that preceded them. But there's also usually a lot more continuity between each period and its immediate predecessors and successors than the self-told stories really make clear.
I see. So it's probably not true that medieval scholars focused more on tradition and ancient texts than Renaissance. In some sense, this should be obvious, it's in the very name "Renaissance". Nevertheless, I have heard this claim several times, so I still wonder where it comes from.
As far as I get it, the "Renaissance of the 12th Century" was in fact only one of several medieval Renaissances. It seems more like it went in and outside of fashion several times, and the standard "Renaissance" was only one such wave.
For the term "Dark Ages", I disagree. I do agree that among historians, it means "period with few record". But that is not how the general public uses it, and I would claim that even non-historian intellectuals don't use it that way. According to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography), the idea of intellectually "Dark Middle Ages" became popular during Enlightenment (though it existed earlier), and the idea remained so strong over centuries that historians eventually stopped using the term because readers kept on misunderstanding it. (Also, by the same source the restriction of the term to Early Middle Ages came much later, in 19th and 20th century.)
Renaissance scholars tended to hero worship the ancients such as Plato (thus we refer to scholarship as "research" rather than "search" because the assumption was that the ancients knew it all and we just have to recover their learning) and criticize medieval scribes who made less that wholly faithful copies of the ancient originals.
During the Renaissance (perhaps especially after the invention of the printing press in the 1450s), scholars noticed that they often had more than one version of ancient texts due to imperfect copying by subsequent scribes. Critical methods had to be invented to figure out what the original text most likely said. From there, criticism continued to expand as a habit of mind. This growing critical spirit is noteworthy in distinguishing the last 600 years in the West from the intellectual framework of other times and places.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
There's an old SSC post where Scott looks at this issue and rejects both the thesis that the Medieval Era was an undifferentiated time when everyone in Europe had the plague and spent their whole lives covered in mud, and the antithesis that the end of Antiquity was barely noticed by anyone outside of a small literati.
Cool, thanks! And the comments on that old post are even better than the article! Lots of expertise. :-)
When did Galen finally go out of fashion? Wikipedia says humorism fell out of fashion in the 1850s:
"Humourism began to fall out of favor in the 1850s with the advent of Germ theory which was able to show that many diseases previously thought to be humoural were in fact caused by pathogens."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism#Western_Medicine
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/09/contrarians-crackpots-and-consensus/
Also the black boxes in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
A very clear review and one palatable to my tastes due to the subject, thank you for this!
I thought this was an excellent book review on an interesting subject. Thank you!
If this has inspired anyone to want to know more about Galen, NYU recently launched a very nice online exhibition about him: https://galen.nyu.yourcultureconnect.com/e/home
> Nature takes on the exact same role in his arguments that evolution would take on in ours:
> “Your school of medicine says that the ureters don’t do anything? Then why are they there? We know that this animal was created by Nature, why would she include these structures if they were truly useless?”
I mean, you could also substitute in "God" here. Saying that Nature wouldn't be wasteful isn't any more of an explanation than that would be; I don't think it's worth giving any credit for this. (And of course, on occasion, nature *is* wasteful...)
Am I the only one who saw that line and immediately went "wait but what about the appendix?" heh
Interestingly though, the appendix may have some purpose in maintaining gut bacteria and repopulating it after infections.
Fair enough, but I suppose my point was vestigial things in general, for example how some humans are born with "throwback" tails or an extra finger. I just get a little white knuckle about the "intelligent design" implication here.
There are definitely "intelligent design" vibes, but it doesn't strike me as all that wrong to think this way from an evolutionary perspective. Nature *isn't* wasteful--it's just not efficient. People evolved fingers for a reason, and having an extra one is just an indication that the formation process went a bit awry. "Divine creation" proponents historically had more trouble explaining such things in themselves, preferring to say "God gives us our burdens to bear, to teach us humility," etc.
Galen probably didn't know about the appendix, since pigs don't have them, and Wikipedia says the first recorded appendectomy was in the 18th century CE
It's an argument that experience shows to be worth *something*, but which, taken as an absolute, rests on the Aristotelian teleological framework, which showed itself ultimately fallacious. Another reason why Galen got "cancelled" in Cartesian times (... and then of course later developments showed that nature sometimes does behave, in some specific ways and contexts, *as if it had* a purpose; natural selection here, law of least action there (but one has to be careful not to overstate the extent to which this can be true)).
<i>It's an argument that experience shows to be worth *something*, but which, taken as an absolute, rests on the Aristotelian teleological framework, which showed itself ultimately fallacious.</i>
Though I can't help but notice that claims of Aristotle's fallaciousness are generally very similar to claims of Galen's stupidity -- in both cases, people don't show more than an extremely shallow acquaintance with the original sources (if they show any acquaintance at all), nor do they stop to consider how such an alleged idiot was able to amass the kind of following he did.
Well, Aristotle's views were reasonable enough; why expect a mechanistic world-view to impose itself in an era before machines? Everyday intuition came from interactions with living beings, many of which clearly have a sense of purpose.
I read a very interesting paper by a physicist which examined Aristotle's actual theories and concluded that they were a fairly good, nonintuitive description of motion in fluids. I think that this link is it:
http://faculty.poly.edu/~jbain/mms/texts/15Rovelli_Aristotle.pdf
Teleology is an inescapable feature of the world; the question is whether you want to locate it in objects themselves, like Aristotle thought, or whether you think it's imposed on them by God, like the mechanists did.
Armand Marie Leroi's 2015 <a href=https://www.amazon.com/Lagoon-How-Aristotle-Invented-Science/dp/0143127985/ref=sr_1_1?crid=IGNGS584OZ4O&dchild=1&keywords=the+lagoon+how+aristotle+invented+science&qid=1618322177&s=books&sprefix=Aristotle+lagoon%2Cstripbooks%2C153&sr=1-1>The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science</a> is an interesting and remarkably sympathetic attempt to set forth exactly what Aristotle believed and why he believed it. Leroi does for Aristotle what this reviewer did for Galen. With the major diffrence that he could read everything Aristotle wrote (well, everything that survived).
https://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/09/16/aristotle-on-the-mayfly
Here's someone fisking Aristotle's actual writing (or at least an English translation of it): http://stevedutch.net/pseudosc/greekswrong.htm
Like I said, "An extremely shallow acquaintance with the original sources". To take but one example, "All natural bodies and magnitudes we hold to be, as such, capable of locomotion" doesn't, despite the fisker's bluster, contradict "the geometric description of motion is accidental, not essential". It's the ability to move (or be moved) which Aristotle thinks belongs to natural bodies and magnitudes by nature, not the precise form which this movement takes.
Aristotle does think the precise form must be a combination of linear & circular, and it's THAT which Dutch insists is "accidental" rather than essential.
So he does, my bad. Though since he also says that "Yes, you can describe all motion as a compound of linear and circular motion", I'm not sure why he thinks Aristotle made a massive howler in saying exactly the same thing.
My impression is that either Aristotle was not as great of a prose stylist as Plato was (whose dialogues remain highly readable after 2400 years), or that much of what we have of Aristotle's are lecture notes written up by his students from their notes. Also, whatever Aristotle wrote in dialogue form hasn't come down to us, which is an unfortunate loss because dialogues tend to be more fun to read.
For what it's worth, Cicero at least considered Aristotle's dialogues to read "like a river of gold" due to their eloquence.
I'd frame this as: yes, teleology as applied to the products of evolution is an imperfect heuristic. But relative to the state of medical science in Galen's time it was pretty darn powerful and accurate, and it sounds like he got a lot of mileage out of it. One can say "modern science shouldn't operate on teleological heuristics" without faulting him for his approach.
> I mean, you could also substitute in "God" here. Saying that Nature wouldn't be wasteful isn't any more of an explanation than that would be; I don't think it's worth giving any credit for this. (And of course, on occasion, nature *is* wasteful...)
It's not really an explanation; it's something far more valuable: a belief that (relatively) consistently pays rent in valid predictions. It's predictions are (as you say) wrong on occasion, but they're far more often right.
This is especially true on the organ scale, which is all Galen had access to confirm its predictions. Organs are enormously expensive to evolve, and so are literally never evolved without a purpose (and very rarely lose that purpose without being coopted for something useful anyhow.)
Indeed, Galen's principle here was generally more accurate in its predictions than pre-1950s evolutionary theory. The recognition of the possibility of vestigial organs led to far more erroneous predictions of vestigiality than correct ones.
It is an explanation though. It's not a good one compared to the explanations we have available today, but it's a theory that distinguishes the world we live in (where most parts of most living things have some purpose) from a very large number of worlds we don't live in (where it's normal for living things to have lots of pointless organs).
A great review. One comment: Bacon was writing during the time when William Harvey was trying to disprove Galen's model of circulation and encountering a lot of resistance. Maybe Galen got cancelled by Harvey partisans, or just acquired a bad reputation for being on the wrong side of this argument?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21781247/
> “Nature”, described in this way, ends up sounding a lot like evolution. Of course, Galen had no concept of evolution, but it’s very interesting to see that he was using a functionally equivalent concept hundreds of years before Darwin. It’s not clear if this is a concept he developed himself or if he inherited it from some earlier thinker, but clearly someone, in looking at biology, noticed that the principle “everything exists for a purpose” was a pretty good starting place for making arguments that turned out to be true.
I don't know whether it was the earliest, but I know of an earlier thinker who basically invented survival of the fittest way before Darwin (okay, admittedly without all the details): Empedocles (a Pre-Socratic philosopher)
"He knew that there is sex in plants, and he had a theory (somewhat fantastic, it must be admitted)
of evolution and the survival of the fittest. Originally, "countless tribes of mortal creatures were
scattered abroad endowed with all manner of forms, a wonder to behold." There were heads
without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without foreheads, solitary limbs seeking for union.
These things joined together as each might chance; there were shambling creatures with countless
hands, creatures with faces and breasts looking in different directions, creatures with the bodies of
oxen and the faces of men, and others with the faces of oxen and the bodies of men. There were
hermaphrodites combining the natures of men and women, but sterile. In the end, only certain
forms survived. "
(Bertrand Russell: A History of Western Philosophy)
Great quote. I do wonder what's going on with the weird double spacing though.
> He knew that there is sex in plants
Everyone in the ancient world knew this; it's important to anyone who wants to grow fruit.
Super interesting, easy to read, humorous (heh heh) -- and not an idea I would have had, to review a book by an ancient author and compare what he actually said with what it's often claimed he did.
I wasn't interested in reading the reviews at all -- "no one ever picks books I'd be interested in, and few have the touch that makes a review enlightening *and* entertaining; hmph", thought I -- but this changed my mind. Thanks for this, anonymous reviewer!
Hm, do you think Scott's book reviews make your cut? For consistent enlightertainment (making that word up) I think his reviews are rarely surpassed; usually it's one or the other: https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/book-review/
I find book reports a hard sell when I tell people about SSC/ASX, but frankly I think this aspect is one of the freshest and most interesting things the Internet has to offer in <current year>.
I really enjoyed this. It was lively, engaging, thoughtful and intelligently written. Quite Scott-esque at times.
I read it too fast because I wanted to get to the end so I could comment, but I'll read it again at a more leisurely pace and I'm already looking forward to the prospect.
Excellent stuff.
I understand that in Galen's time, Alexandria was the place to go to learn medicine, because they didn't mind cutting up dead bodies at the med school there.
For a similar reasons, it is surmised that Galen took a job doctoring up gladiators because it gave him a more...hands on insight into human anatomy and how it worked.
Of course, Aristotle was way off on a lot of things, but he was considered an authority for longer than Galen was.
Really good book review. Make me aware of a book I should be interested in, tell me where you're going with this and why you're reviewing it, then make good on all those promises. I feel like I know a lot more than I did before. I also really appreciate going back and reading a foundational text rather than just something new and modern and trendy (not that there's anything wrong with the latter, just that we don't get enough of the former).
"All who drink of this treatment recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die. It is obvious, therefore, that it fails only in incurable cases.”
Without context, the above can easily be interpreted as mockably fallacious. But Galen was talking - whether he was right or wrong - about a specific medicine, not proposing a logical syllogism. There is a factor which is potentially empirically relevant, i.e. the short recovery time after drinking.
Consider, for example, the Heimlich manoeuvre. Surely that operates in just such a fashion? Those who can be helped by it are helped immediately. Those who cannot will die. Defibrillation is another example. There is no reason in principle why it should not be the case for a drug also.
It's certainly not *obvious* that someone who can't be helped by the Heimlich manoeuvre or by defibrillation is incurable.
One can quibble about the details - yes, for example, a tracheostomy might work, but might not be a practical solution if medical professionals are not present. And perhaps use of the word 'obvious' is too strong. My point is that the criticisms of Galen's wording are implicitly attributing to him a major, not minor, fallacy - and there is no strong reason to believe this major fallacy was present.
I guess it just still seems like a fallacy to me. There's a big difference between "either it cures you quickly or you die" and "if this doesn't cure you, you're incurable". You can say the first thing of the Heimlich manoeuvre, or defibrillation, and plausibly you can say it of this medicine. I don't think you can say the second thing of any of the three, and if you wanted to try you'd need to bring in some reason to think it.
I guess if you tried to translate the first thing into a logical proposition "for all person, (sick(person) and given-medicine(person)) => (cured-quickly(person) or dies-quickly(person))", it implies the second thing, but... I dunno, "you're going to die soon" feels like it has an implied "given our current knowledge and abilities", where "you're incurable" feels like it explicitly denies that extra clause.
(Clarifying here that there seems to be no particular reason to think Galen ever made this mistake, and this is an epistemological point rather than a point in favor or against Galen. Not accusing you of thinking otherwise, just seems worth being explicit to help avoid readers losing track of context.)
Um, but it now occurs to me that trying to read such implications across thousands of years and at least one translator seems... risky. So I guess my previous comments need to be tempered in that light.
> But Galen was talking
Was he? The review seems to come down on the side of the quote being apocryphal.
This was a great idea, and a very informative piece. Kudos to the author.
>Though the translator often insists on translating “humor” as “juice”
I openly cackled when I read this, and I love it. It seems to be a much more accurate translation and much better describes what a "humor" is.
In German, it's literally called Säftelehre (juice-teaching).
I laughed with our Author's admission that this juicy word choice made them "very uncomfortable". I then noticed that they simply gave us the straight, even unremarkable, phenomenologic truth. We all feel the discomfort. So why laugh?
"It's funny because it's true" - this explains a lot of Rationalist humor - which I admire, to be clear. A lot of humor, if not all, also elucidates, e.g. draws to a punchline, a contradiction. Perhaps this kind of frankness is funny because it is true, and because it reminds us that we live in a world of degraded discourse where writers so often obfuscate, lie, hide the simple truth. The contradiction instantly elucidated, then, is this Comedic Situation: a humble truth-teller in a loud lying world.
Outstanding! 5/5 in style, I would believe this was written by Scott, maybe just a bit more succinct. I think you steelman Galen a bit too much however, the "evolution" section was a bit too laughable. Don't give the guy points for sounding like he knows what he's talking about, stick to praising his empirical heuristics.
Meh – I think it's perfectly fair (and better overall) to "give the guy points for sounding like he knows what he's talking about".
The detailed history of the development of the theory of natural selection, or any major scientific theory, sure makes it seem like a long period of people "sounding like [they know] what [they're] talking about" before the final recognizable theory is described (and then, often much later, confirmed).
And a lot of scientific theorizing would similarly seem like 'giving people points for sounding like they know what they're talking about' based on your implied standards – take special relativity as another example. Others had, e.g. already derived the relevant mathematics, before Einstein wrapped it all up in an explanation that we all now agree is palatable.
The history of mathematics, physics, chemistry, is _riddled_ with people 'sounding like they know what they're talking about'. Yes, they mostly weren't producing 'good' scientific theories, for all kinds of reasons, but I think of that as the (probably inevitable) manner in which people 'locate a hypothesis in hypothesis space'.
This is pretty inconsequential, but I have an interesting thought about this anyway:
"reports that corn will spontaneously draw water out of nearby earthen jars and increase in weight, which I’m pretty sure is not true."
Actually, this seems plausible to me. Earthen jars tend to be somewhat porous and they were probably not glazed, so water being stored in them will slowly evaporate over the course of weeks or months. By "corn" he was surely not referring to the yellow vegetable you eat off the cob, because corn is native to Central America and was not introduced into Europe until the Colombian Exchange. I am not totally sure, but I think the antiquated meaning of "corn" was closer to that of "cereal" or "flour". And it seems plausible to me that flour can absorb water vapor out of humid air.
So if you store a bunch of water and flour next to each other inside non-watertight earthen jars in your basement, the water will evaporate out of the water jars and some will absorb into the flour, making it heaver.
According to quora (https://www.quora.com/Did-Ancient-Romans-have-corn):
> When Europeans say “corn”, it’s a general term for any grain or cereal crop, including wheat, barley, millet, sorghum, oats and rye. These are native to the Old World, and the Romans would have cultivated or at least known about them.
I wasn't aware of this usage for "corn".
Yup. Maize was known as "Indian Corn" and over time the adjective just dropped off.
We still call it Sweet Corn in the UK, to distinguish from generic corn which is what you make bread dough from.
Cobden & Bright weren't railing against protectionism for maize in the "Corn Law".
I also suspect Galen meant jars the grain was stored in and translation telephone turned that into "nearby".
"Corn" in European context refers to wheat (mostly), oats, barley and other cereals. When maize was introduced from the New World, it was known as "Indian corn" or "yellow meal" when ground.
Purchased as an emergency food supply during the Famine, it became known as "Peel's Brimstone" because of its yellow colour, and due to people not knowing how to mill and cook it properly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Government_response
"Confronted by widespread crop failure in November 1845, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, purchased £100,000 worth of maize and cornmeal secretly from America with Baring Brothers initially acting as his agents. The government hoped that they would not "stifle private enterprise" and that their actions would not act as a disincentive to local relief efforts. Due to poor weather conditions, the first shipment did not arrive in Ireland until the beginning of February 1846. The initial shipments were of unground dried kernels, but the few Irish mills in operation were not equipped for milling maize and a long and complicated milling process had to be adopted before the meal could be distributed. In addition, before the cornmeal could be consumed, it had to be "very much" cooked again, or eating it could result in severe bowel complaints. Due to its yellow colour, and initial unpopularity, it became known as "Peel's brimstone"."
https://www.rte.ie/history/the-great-irish-famine/2020/1117/1178730-the-temporary-relief-commission/
"As chairman, Routh worked hard to counter the initial resistance to Indian corn, derisively dubbed ‘Peel’s brimstone’ because of its sulphurous yellow colour. The hard, unpalatable grain was far removed from the diet of potatoes to which the rural poor had become accustomed and, if not boiled for long enough, the alien foodstuff could cause painful indigestion and, in some cases, dysentery.
Routh become a public advocate of its use and benefits, overseeing the publication of thousands of instructional handbills and a popular pamphlet with instructions for its preparation. The resistance, however, was short-lived. In the words of the unfortunately-named commissary general, Sir Edward Pine-Coffin, in a letter to Trevelyan on 30 March 1846, the Indian meal was ‘much too good a thing to be long rejected by starving people’.
In practice, the Relief Commission was hindered by internal disagreements and Trevelyan’s rigorous oversight and the public works schemes were beset by bureaucratic delays and inefficiencies. Nonetheless, the relief measures devised by Peel succeeded in averting many deaths.
As Isaac Butt pronounced in the Dublin University Magazine in April 1847, ‘the timely precaution [of importing Indian corn] and the subsequent judicious distribution of this store had the effect of bringing the people through the winter that closed the year 1845.’"
It is used now to make cornflour, used as a thickening agent for soups and gravies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_starch
Fantastic. Finalist #2 has done an impressive job of capturing Scott's book review style, and I can't pay a much higher compliment than that.
I think touches like doing the extra legwork to research the historical context of the writer and not just the work itself are what really push it over the edge into exceptional. One signature move of Scott's is to relay some amusing, often absurd-sounding anecdote found in the writing of the piece, and the bit on Galen having to write a dedicated piece to combat the various imitators and servants pawning off his letters is EXACTLY that. It adds humor to the piece, depth and context to the work's author, and really underscores the depth of research put into the review.
Of course, the overall review itself is also written in a super readable style and the flow is very logical and smoothly laid out. This is going to be a really high bar to clear given how well it manages to match our host's style. Then again, in true transhumanist fashion, we should hope for and demand Super Scott from one of the remaining 12 entries, perhaps?
In turn, this is a great review of the review!
> "You know, reading about Galen reminded me of someone… a physician… trained all around the world… a prolific writer… constantly drawn into disputes about philosophy and empirical practice… who am I thinking of…"
Am I just being really dense, and is this obvious to everyone? I was thinking Maimonides, but maybe it is Locke, or Schweitzer. Or is he talking about Fauci?
I assumed he meant Scott.
Wow. I am way too tired to be reading these reviews :)
I mean it is kind of an oblique description.
It's Scott. Maybe you've just had a long day / haven't had your morning coffee yet :)
Did Scott train all around the world? The rest lined up, obviously, but that bit kept me looking for a better fit.
He did med school in Ireland I believe.
"All around the world" is a bit of a stretch, but he did graduate from a medical school in Ireland.
Which isn't his homeland, but it's still only one place.
Hence 'a bit of a stretch'.
He also had formative experiences in Haiti and Japan. Okay, the latter as an English teacher, not a doctor... but still, it was a training :)
> "If that which is white becomes black, or what is black becomes white, it undergoes motion in respect to colour..."
I've noticed this before in ancient Greek works, but it's still striking that to them—at least if the translations are apt—change was considered a type of motion, while in our culture we more usually consider motion a type of change (a change in place).
And I wonder when this changed, and whether there is a particular reason that it had to.
(A lot of the apparent weirdness in Greek philosophy is mostly from just having conventional translations that have different connotations, so it might just be a thing that didn't leave the Greek language, but I don't know how it is in modern Greek.)
Seeing change as motion has kind of had a comeback with physics-adjacent types, though?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system
To me, change as motion implies smooth, gradual change through intermediate states, just like motion in space. As opposed to a sharp, qualitative 'step' change.
So for example, any two colors can be connected by a gradient of color change. And when objects change color over time, e.g. ripening fruit, they display some intermediate colors.
On the other hand, when water boils into steam, there's no apparent intermediate state between the two.
Our senses are finite and imprecise, and before modern instruments and modern physics, one could make an argument that either kind of change of fundamental and the other one arises from it.
So maybe all change is gradual, and water-into-steam is just so fast that the quantity of matter in the hypothetical state between water and steam is very small and short-lived, and we can't observe it directly because of all the bubbling.
Or maybe all change is qualitative, and when an apple seems to go from green to red over time, it's really a mix of very many very small pieces of matter which individually transition from pure green to pure red, but we only perceive the overall color of the mix as the proportion of green to red pieces changes.
> On the other hand, when water boils into steam, there's no apparent intermediate state between the two.
Having observed some boiling water – and maybe being a contrarian mood! – I'm not sure what this means.
I recognize that this is the accepted 'cartoon physics', and phase transitions _are_ a thing, but it also doesn't really match observations!
At the macroscopic human scale from which most people ever have or will observe water boiling, there sure seem to be LOTs of 'apparent intermediate states' between non-boiling water and boiling water. One reason being that there are many varieties, or intermediate states, of 'boiling'!
The closets thing to "no apparent intermediate state", for boiling water, that I think could be observed (by a person, with their unaided senses) is something like boiling (distilled) water in a microwave (e.g. "superheated exploding water"). All of the other more typical means of boiling water (most of which is NOT distilled) look very much like they involved a whole continuum of intermediate states.
And I would bet that these ancient intellectuals could easily understand 'phase transitions'. For one, I'd expect most of them to know about routs in battle and that's pretty obviously a phenomena where small intermediate states, at one level, result in a drastic and sudden qualitative change at a higher one (i.e. larger scale).
When the water is partially boiled, it isn't in a semi-steam state; rather some of it is still water and some of it is steam. You can clearly see bubbles of steam within the liquid.
Yes, I understand that. That's the modern understanding!
My point is that, if you (yourself) observe, e.g. a pot of boiling water, it isn't obvious that "partially boiled" isn't an intermediate state. We can't observe the individual water molecules with our eyes. But even if we could, we couldn't _perfectly_ separate all of the water molecules into 'water' or 'steam'.
Part of the 'problem' is that 'liquid' and 'gas' don't make sense as descriptions of individual molecules. They're both (necessarily) applicable only to (fairly large) ensembles or collections of molecules.
And, even in water at thermal equilibrium with its surroundings, some (tiny) amount of the liquid water is 'boiling' off of its surface. And, similarly, some (tiny) amount of steam condenses back into liquid water too, even during boiling.
There _is_ a 'sharp' phase transition, but it doesn't occur at an obviously visible scale. And I think the 'modern understanding' obfuscates a lot of the (interesting) details of what's going on in what we can observe ourselves with our own faculties. When you boil a pot of water on your stove, only a very small portion of the volume 'boils'. So the volume of water – the visible thing we can observe with our eyes over the span of seconds, minutes, and hours – doesn't itself, as a whole, undergo a rapid phase transition. The phase transition happens at much smaller scales, e.g. the bubbles of steam visible in the pot of water. That seems to me like a much more interesting, and complicated, phenomena than _strictly_ emphasizing the 'phase transition' between liquid and gas.
I disagree that the sharp phase transition isn't obvious. I can't see individual molecules, but as you note liquid and gas are descriptions of collections of molecules. And those I can see!
That's a good point!
I think I'm thinking of this as what's reasonable to _expect_ for people that don't already have our modern understanding of the states of matter and the relevant phase transitions among them.
But I think it's hard to appreciate how non-obvious something like 'bubbles in boiling water are pockets of gaseous water inside the larger volume of liquid'.
When you pour boiling (or near boiling) water on coffee grounds, you'll observe bubbles, but the grounds aren't being sublimated, or melted and then boiled – there is pre-existing gas escaping.
And I'm struggling to think how someone could figure out the difference between the two without most of our modern understanding.
A big general problem is that, for any ontology, Nature is perfectly content 'crossing levels' (or ontologies).
Any intuitions we have about mundane boiling of pots of water is inextricably complicated by small details, e.g. the drastic difference in the behavior of boiling ('impure') water in a pot on a stove versus superheating distilled water in a microwave.
Most people, with whatever (partial) understanding modern scientific theories have provided them, consider the messy 'real world' examples, whereas the scientific theories much more accurately describe 'contrived' experiments like the superheated exploding microwave water. The latter is a much better macroscopic example of a phase transition!
Great review!
<i>“Nature”, described in this way, ends up sounding a lot like evolution. Of course, Galen had no concept of evolution, but it’s very interesting to see that he was using a functionally equivalent concept hundreds of years before Darwin. It’s not clear if this is a concept he developed himself or if he inherited it from some earlier thinker, but clearly someone, in looking at biology, noticed that the principle “everything exists for a purpose” was a pretty good starting place for making arguments that turned out to be true.</i>
I don't know who originated the argument, but Aristotle was fond of saying that "nature does nothing in vain".
I suspect this idea of nature is a lot like other pre-scientific principles – and it seems like this was also a (mostly) necessary ingredient in developing what we now think of as 'scientific theories'.
Relativity – the general pre-scientific principle that Einstein kinda just _assumed_ for the sake of his argument for Special Relativity – always seemed like a similarly philosophical or metaphysical stance that wasn't (and couldn't have been) 'scientific'.
This was an unexpectedly enjoyable piece about a topic I knew absolutely nothing about, props to the author! But... if I had one nit to pick it's that they seem a little more credulous of Galen's perspective vis-a-vis his critics than is maybe wise. Anyone who adopts a beleaguered, surrounded-by-fools stance in describing their critics raises the question of "is this guy a lone voice of sanity in the wilderness, or is he just setting up strawmen to knock down?" Given that we don't have writings from his contemporaries to cross-check against, it seems like we're potentially committing the same error against them--trusting someone who says "check out this idiot, how can anyone believe something so stupid!"--as we were originally against Galen.
Wow, the quality of these reviews has been really high.
I totally agree. I read the first entry and was amazed by the review, and thought that this might be my winner. After the second one, I already have no idea how to decide because both are amazing in their own way. Awesome work!
The lines in Moliere that I found on Google books are "Quia est in eo Virtus dormitiva, Cujus est natura Sensus assoupire."
One translation is: "Because it contains a dormitive virtue, Whose nature is to put the senses to sleep."
I always thought that Moliere's satirical line about how a sleeping medicine worked due to its dormitive virtue seemed a little harsh: the term "dormitive virtue" can be seen as a placeholder for some precise mechanism that will be discovered in the future. Perhaps 17th Century France, however, didn't have much sense of scientific progress, so my reaction that "well of course scientists will eventually figure out how this medicine's dormitive virtue works" would not have been natural to Moliere.
> As much as modern authors like to describe the humors as imaginary, Galen routinely talks about them as if he were actually collecting and measuring them!
I think it's not so much that the humors themselves are imaginary—they were referring to actual bodily fluids—but the way they classified them does not match any way that we classify bodily fluids today, and accordingly the properties ascribed to those groupings aren't necessarily going to correspond to anything we would recognize.
If I call several unrelated fluids 'phlegm' my ideas of how 'phlegm' works as a category can be anywhere from inaccurate to magical.
I read something many years ago, and unfortunately I have no idea how to find it again.
There was a doctor in the early 20th century who had some blood in a sealed test tube. After a while the components of the blood settled out, forming four distinct layers. The doctor understood what had happened in modern terms, but he also figured he had discovered what the ancients were looking at when they talked out the four humors.
This makes me wonder about something else: if what we call blood is actually mix of all four humors, how is bloodletting supposed to correct an imbalance?
> This makes me wonder about something else: if what we call blood is actually mix of all four humors, how is bloodletting supposed to correct an imbalance?
Blood being a mix of all four humors wouldn't require it to be an _equal_ mix of all four humors. If there's disproportionately more of some humor, it would reduce that humor's proportion accordingly.
If my blood is uniformly 26% phlegm, and you draw some of my blood, both your sample and my remaining blood will remain 26% phlegm. Maybe they thought it wasn't uniform, though? Maybe different parts of the body had different proportions?
The proportion within your blood would be unchanged, yes, but it would affect the amount in your body considered as a sum.
(I suppose I am taking it as assumed that the imbalance in question is one in the body as a whole, and that bloodletting was thus used for issues that weren't necessarily in the blood per se; I admit I don't know offhand if this is actually how the theory would be applied.)
That's a really cool idea except that AFAIK blood in a test tube separates into three layers, not four.
Any chance that would be impacted by what the vessel is made of or any impurities?
That's because humanity has degenerated since Galen's time.
Ha!
As far as I know, it is true (at least in the opinion of the original physician):
"Robin Fåhræus (1921), a Swedish physician who devised the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, suggested that the four humours were based upon the observation of blood clotting in a transparent container. When blood is drawn in a glass container and left undisturbed for about an hour, four different layers can be seen. A dark clot forms at the bottom (the 'black bile'). Above the clot is a layer of red blood cells (the 'blood'). Above this is a whitish layer of white blood cells (the 'phlegm'). The top layer is clear yellow serum (the 'yellow bile')."
Fåhræus goes on to point out that the relative amounts of the four 'fluids' differ in samples from a healthy person and a person with bacterial pneumonia. From this sort of observation, he argues, you can see why Galen might have found humorism convincing.
Was it this? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Irving-Kushner/publication/232812185_The_4_Humors_and_Erythrocyte_Sedimentation_The_Most_Influential_Observation_in_Medical_History/links/5a63eca40f7e9b6b8fd89a85/The-4-Humors-and-Erythrocyte-Sedimentation-The-Most-Influential-Observation-in-Medical-History.pdf?origin=publication_detail
I think it was probably a different article about Dr. Fåhraeus. Thank you!