GEH 101 - Required Reading - Rothman, Medicine and Western Civilization due Mon. 9/30/02

Aristotle, “On the Generation of Animals” 80-83

• Aristotle believed that female sexual organs are “inverse and inferior analogues” of the male’s (79). What does that mean?

• How are semen and catamenia alike, according to Aristotle? How are they different?

• What does the male contribute to the reproductive process, according to Aristotle? What does the female contribute?

• What other assumptions about the differences between males and females does Aristotle state or imply in this text?

• Do you see any connections between this classical theory of the differences between men and women and D.H. Lawrence’s ideas in Women in Love?

Keywords:  analogue, attrition, catamenia, efflux, embryology, sanguineous, spiritus

Galen, “The Hand” 15-22

• To what particular sector of Roman society was Galen the physician?

• What were Galen’s beliefs about the body as a divine creation?

• What is the primary usefulness of the parts of the body, according to Galen?

• What do hands have to do with the intelligence of a being, according to Galen?

• What relationship does Galen imply between the body and the “character and faculties of the soul”?

• Galen describes man’s parts as having a compensatory function. For what do they compensate? (19)

• What do you think Galen (and Aristotle, whom he quotes) means when he says that “the hand is the instrument for all instruments because it if formed by Nature to receive them all”(19)?

• What is the analogy Galen makes between the hand: instruments and reason: arts (19)?

• What does Galen mean by the “sympathy” of the parts of the body?

• How does Galen propose we should discover the proper form of any bodily part (22)?

• Can we generalize Galen’s ideas about the relationship between body parts and wholes, body structure and action to some other system of parts and wholes/structure and action? What might a philosophy of social relationships built on these ideas look like?

Keywords: circumscription, faculties, lyre, prehensile, sympathy

Recommended Reading (Optional) for this unit:  Conrad, The Western Medical Tradition, Chapter 2 (especially 52-70)