Anonymous Londiniensis

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The Papyrus Anonymus Londiniensis , column 5, lines 23-45 (from: Supplementum Aristotelicum III.1, 1893)

Anonymus Londiniensis (also: Anonymus Londinensis ) is a Greek papyrus with medical content from around the 1st / 2nd centuries. Century AD. It is considered an important work for the history of science and the history of philosophy . The text, whose author is unknown, was discovered in the British Museum . It is a fragmentary extract from an ancient doxography of medicine and can be described as a kind of medical history . One assumes with a certain probability that the papyrus is an edited version of a writing from the circle of students of Aristotle (e.g. Menon). The text was not necessarily written in Egypt, where it was found, but perhaps in Asia.

meaning

Alongside Plato and Aristotle , the papyrus is the oldest source on Hippocrates , who is only mentioned in the papyrus as one doctor among many and not in the role that was later prominently emphasized. He is described more as a sophist than as the ideal of a doctor and "father of medicine". The papyrus shows that there were a large number of medicine writers in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

In addition, before the discovery of the papyrus, the importance of the philosophers Philolaos and Plato for the medicine of the ancient world was not yet understood.

An important testimony to the starting point of scientific theories in antiquity can be found in the papyrus: Herophilos of Chalcedon is mentioned here, who mentions the empirical observation of the phenomena as the starting point for heuristic , not purely logical scientific theories , which must precede the theories. It is also known from the papyrus that Erasistratos carried out at least one quantitative experiment in physiology, which already resembles the experiments in the 17th century, which are now considered to be a sign of the appearance of the modern experimental method.

construction

Almost 2000 lines have been preserved. The main part can be divided into three sections: The first section contains a list of definitions of medical concepts about diseases. The second section gives the etiological opinions of 20 famous authors about the causes of diseases. Including Plato's Timaeus . The third section deals with physiology . The papyrus is also inscribed on the back with the manuscripts of three different authors. The Aristotelian section of the papyrus begins by stating that there has been significant disagreement about what causes disease in the first place.

The medical views on the composition of the body attributed to the physician Polybos are similar to the Hippocratic writing On the Nature of Man . Some of the theories mentioned in the papyrus are very similar to Plato's theories.

Research on papyrus since 1893

The papyrus was first described by Frederic G. Kenyon in 1892 and published in 1893 by Hermann Diels . Research on papyrus has changed a lot since its publication.

The publication had caused a stir because the papyrus contradicted the centuries-old understanding of Hippocratic medicine. The immediate debate then centered on the question of identifying the sources of the ideas ascribed to Hippocrates in the papyrus, on the question of the originator of the papyrus, and on the question of the reliability of the doxographic sections relating to Aristotle. Less attention was paid to the actual theories described in the papyrus, rather than to the unknown authors.

The figure of Hippocrates depicted in the papyrus did not correspond to the image that 19th century science had of him. For a long time science therefore concentrated on the question of Hippocrates instead of examining the text as a complete work. It was only during the preparations for a new edition of the text that new approaches emerged and the emphasis on the realization that the text is clearly incomplete and perhaps just the draft of a work that should include a wider range of material. The physiological part breaks off in the middle of the text and is unfinished. It is possible that the text was copied by an uneducated writer, which led to errors.

The historiography and philology of the 19th century made great efforts to collect and reconstruct texts such as Anonymus Londiniensis , which, especially during the imperial era, were dedicated to the collection and classification of a wealth of earlier texts and teachings. However, if Diels still viewed Anonymus Londiniensis as a somewhat accidental collection of texts, today reference is made to its coherence and a specific cultural motivation of antiquity for writing the text, knowledge of which is essential and which represents a value in itself.

expenditure

  • Anonymous Londinensis. Excerpts of an unknown from Aristotle-Menon's Handbook of Medicine and from the works of other older Aertze. Edited in Greek by Hermann Diels , German edition by Heinrich Beckh and Franz Spät. Reimer, Berlin 1896 ( digitized version ).
  • Anonymus Londiniensis: De medicina. Edidit Daniela Manetti. De Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-1102-1871-8 .

literature

  • Jordi Crespo Saumell: New Lights on the Anonymus Londiniensis Papyrus . In: Journal of Ancient Philosophy . tape 11 , no. 2 , 2017, p. 120–150 , doi : 10.11606 / issn.1981-9471.v11i2p120-150 (English).
  • Daniela Manetti: Aristotle and the Role of Doxography in the Anonymus Londinensis (PBrLibr inv . 137) . In: Philip van der Eijk (Ed.): Ancient Histories of Medicine . Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity (=  John Scarborough , Philip J. van der Eijk, Ann Ellis Hanson, Joseph Ziegler [Eds.]: Studies in Ancient Medicine . Volume 20 ). Brill, Leiden / Boston / Cologne 1999, ISBN 90-04-10555-7 (English, limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Jutta Kollesch , Diethard Nickel : Ancient healing art. Selected texts from the medical writings of the Greeks and Romans. Philipp Reclam jun., Leipzig 1979 (= Reclams Universal Library. Volume 771); 6th edition ibid 1989, ISBN 3-379-00411-1 , p. 63 f. ( Anonymus Londinensis, Col. XXIV 19 – XXV 23 : "According to this we have to make comments about food: [...].")

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jordi Crespo Saumell: New Lights on the Anonymus Londiniensis Papyrus . In: Journal of Ancient Philosophy . tape 11 , no. 2 , 2017, p. 120–150 , doi : 10.11606 / issn.1981-9471.v11i2p120-150 (English).
  2. ^ A b c d Karl-Heinz Leven : The Invention of Hippocrates - Eid, Roman and Corpus Hippocraticum . In: Ulrich Tröhler, Stella Reiter-Theil, Eckhard Herych (eds.): Ethics and Medicine, 1947 - 1997 . What does the codification of ethics do? Wallstein, Göttingen 1997, ISBN 3-89244-272-X ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  3. ↑ a b c d Daniela Manetti: Aristotle and the Role of Doxography in the Anonymus Londinensis (PBrLibr inv . 137) . In: Philip van der Eijk (Ed.): Ancient Histories of Medicine . Essays in Medical Doxography and Historiography in Classical Antiquity (=  John Scarborough , Philip J. van der Eijk, Ann Ellis Hanson, Joseph Ziegler [Eds.]: Studies in Ancient Medicine . Volume 20 ). Brill, Leiden / Boston / Cologne 1999, ISBN 90-04-10555-7 (English, limited preview in the Google book search).
  4. ↑ Klaus Bergdolt : The conscience of medicine . Medical Morals from Ancient Times to Today. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-52192-4 , pp. 48 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ^ Geoffrey Lloyd : Methods and Problems in Greek Science . Selected papers. Cambridge University Press, New York / Port Chester / Melbourne / Sydney 1991, ISBN 0-521-39762-6 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  6. ^ A b Elizabeth Craik : The "Hippocratic" Corpus . Content and Context. Routledge, London / New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-317-56789-9 (English, ancient Greek, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  7. ↑ a b Lucio Russo , Silvio Levy: The Forgotten Revolution . How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn. Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg / New York 2004, ISBN 3-540-20068-1 (English, limited preview in the Google book search).
  8. ↑ a b c d Vivian Nutton : Ancient Medicine (=  Sciences of Antiquity ). 2nd Edition. Routledge, London / New York 2013, ISBN 978-0-415-52094-2 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  9. ^ Frederic G. Kenyon: A Medical Papyrus in the British Museum. In: The Classical Review. Volume 6, Issue 6, 1892, pp. 237-240.
  10. ↑ Hermann Diels (ed.): Anonymi Londinensis ex Aristotelis Iatricis Menoniis et aliis medicis eclogae (= Supplementum Aristotelicum . Volume 3.1). Reimer, Berlin 1893 ( digitized version ). New edition with English translation by: William Henry Samuel Jones: The Medical Writings of Anonymus Londinensis (= Cambridge Classical Studies ). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1947.