Galenic studies have expanded rapidly over the last few decades and in a variety of directions. A new handbook, after the Cambridge Companion to Galen (2008), is therefore entirely appropriate and most timely. This volume does an excellent job in providing a lucid and attractively presented overview of the field and in setting out the main recent developments in Galenic scholarship. While the work is primarily intended for non-experts, experienced Galenists can learn much from it as well. For it goes far beyond what one may expect from a handbook in offering a number of substantial innovative contributions, with detailed scholarly apparatus, on parts of Galen’s work that have not yet received much attention (such as the pulse or his theory of disease); and some chapters are the first, in the history of Galenic studies, to provide systematic accounts of particular areas or aspects of Galen’s work (e.g. the chapter on Galen and Hellenistic medicine). A further distinctive feature of the volume is a long section devoted to Galen’s legacy, not only in the Western medical tradition but also in East Asia, including Tibet and China, showing that the impact of Galen’s work, both diachronically and geographically, was even greater than already suspected.

The volume starts with a chronological table of Galen’s life and the subsequent stages of the reception of his work and ideas. In the introduction, one of the two editors, Singer, sets out the layout and organisation of the volume and offers a brief account of the shifting receptions of Galen’s work in later times. Some of this is elaborated in the following chapters, but the final section of the introduction also gives an overview of Galenic scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this timeframe, Singer points out, Galen’s authority as a medical doctor waned and gave way to predominantly philological treatments (in the form of critical editions, e.g. those starting to be produced in the early twentieth century for the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum). These were later followed by approaches from the perspectives of ancient philosophy and science, the social and cultural history of the Roman Empire and linguistic and literary studies into the rhetorical features of the Galenic writings. This development shows that Galen’s life and work have a significance that goes far beyond medical history and have managed to attract interest from a variety of disciplines, both within the study of the ancient world and also in neighbouring disciplines such as Arabic and Syriac studies.

The book is divided into three parts. There is a section on ‘Medical and Intellectual Contexts’, followed by a section on ‘Topics and Works’. The rationale of this division is explained in the introduction, and it works reasonably well, at least for the chapters on Galen’s life and works (V. Boudon-Millot), philosophy, science and psychology (Singer), rhetoric and the Second Sophistic (C. Petit), Hippocratism (S. Coughlin) and Hellenistic medicine (D. Leith), which portray the various backgrounds, both within and beyond Graeco-Roman medicine, against which Galen’s activities can be better understood. The chapters on gynaecology (R. Flemming), pharmacology (J. Laskaris) and surgery (L. Bliquez) provide a smooth transition to the second section, which focuses on Galen’s work, with chapters on logic and scientific method (M. Havrda), anatomy and physiology (L. Salas), physics and causation (R.J. Hankinson), again pharmacology (Singer, M. Martelli, L. Raggetti), pathology (J. Devinant), clinical practice (S. Mattern), food and diet (J. Wilkins), pulse (O. Lewis), diagnostics (P. Tassinari) and ethics (Rosen). There is some duplication at times (e.g. between p. 348 and Chapter 17, where a cross-reference would have been desirable), but this is not a major problem. Section 3 is dedicated to Galen’s afterlife, with chapters on late antiquity and early Byzantium (C. Salazar), later Byzantium (A. Pietrobelli), translations into Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew (P.E. Pormann), Islamicate medicine (A.R. Das), the medieval West (S. Fortuna), the early modern period (H. Hirai), Galen’s anatomy in the Renaissance (V. Nutton), Galen’s legacy in Jewish and Muslim medical traditions in the West (C. Caballero-Navas), Galenic medicine in South Asia (F. Speziale) and in Tibet and China (D. Weil and R. Yoeli-Tlalim). Here the novelty of the volume is less spectacular in comparison to existing work, for example Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Galen (2019).

While there are no major gaps, it should be mentioned that the contributors are all from Humanities subjects, and this reflects the fact that, at least in the English-speaking scholarly world today, research into Galen, and into ancient medicine more broadly, seems almost exclusively an Arts and Humanities business, with very little input from people with a medical or scientific background (though on pp. 27–8 Singer refers to trans-historical perspectives on the relevance of Galen to contemporary medical practice; and in some areas, such as the study of ancient pharmacology, attempts are now made to combine scientific methods with historical and philological approaches). Bearing in mind that in a number of countries (e.g. Germany) the academic discipline of History of Medicine is institutionalised within medical faculties, it would be worth exploring what Galen’s work, as it has opened up in recent years, has to offer to the study of the history and archaeology of disease, palaeopathology and environmental history, or how readers with a medical eye would assess his role in the history of pathology, diagnostics and therapeutics (the chapter on surgery goes some way towards addressing this). These approaches have been out of fashion for some time, but within the current state of Galenic scholarship renewed attempts may now profitably be made to combine the historical and the medical, both in the translation and interpretation of Galen’s writings and in the study of their various contexts.

The Appendix at the end of the volume listing all Galenic works, with editions, (English) translations and online resources, gives a good impression of what has been achieved, but also of how much there still is to do. Vast areas of the Galenic corpus, especially the pharmacological treatises, the works on the pulse and some of the Hippocratic commentaries, still lack the basic requirements of a critical edition and a reliable translation and are available only in the unsatisfactory nineteenth-century edition by K.G. Kühn. So there is a great deal of work to be done, to which this volume provides a very helpful basis. It closes with a substantial subject index with detailed subdivisions, though it is unfortunate for Galen scholars that no index locorum is included.