Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Language, Literature and Humanities - Alexander von Humboldt Professorship

Project description

Christine Salazar was working on three projects. For the ’Towards a Galen in English’ project, she was preparing a translation of Galen’s Commentary on Hippocrates’ Prognostikon, accompanied by notes and introduction. Various aspects make the text fascinating: Not only does it provide a wealth of information about medical theories and practice, with many references to further Hippocratic, Galenic and other texts, but there are also Galen’s linguistic explanations, hints about his teaching, or comments about manuscripts.

At the same time, she was working for the SFB 980 on a very similar project, except that in this case the text was book 2 of Aetius of Amida’s Books on Medicine. In the case of Aetius, chronologically the second of the great late antique/early Byzantine encyclopaedists, the interest lies not only in the content of the work, but also in the way in which he uses his sources. Even when copying more or less verbatim from Galen, he picks and chooses, combining different sections of the original, and at other times he paraphrases or uses authors whose works are otherwise lost.
Colleagues of Christine are currently trying to bring these projects to completion and to prepare these manuscripts for publication.

Along with these two projects, she was also trying to continue working on the sourcebook of early Byzantine medicine, for which she had received a grant from the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and had a contract with Bloomsbury (originally Duckworth). This was to be a selection of texts in translation with explanatory notes, as an introduction to early Byzantine medicine for those without Greek.