Description: Mixtures is of central importance for Galen's views on the human body. It presents his influential typology of the human organism according to nine mixtures (or 'temperaments') of hot, cold, dry and wet. It also develops Galen's ideal of the 'well-tempered' person, whose perfect balance ensures excellent performance both physically and psychologically. Mixtures teaches the aspiring doctor how to assess the patient's mixture by training one's sense of touch and by a sophisticated use of diagnostic indicators. It presents a therapeutic regime based on the interaction between foods, drinks, drugs and the body's mixture. Mixtures is a work of natural philosophy as well as medicine. It acknowledges Aristotle's profound influence whilst engaging with Hippocratic ideas on health and nutrition, and with Stoic, Pneumatist and Peripatetic physics. It appears here in a new translation, with generous annotation, introduction and glossaries elucidating the argument and setting the work in its intellectual context.
Brief description: P. N. Singer is a Wellcome Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. His research centres on Graeco-Roman medicine, especially Galen; on the interface of philosophical and medical ideas; and especially on the history of conceptions of the mind, psychology and ethics. He published the first major collection of texts by Galen in English translation with Galen: Selected Works (1997) and edited Galen: Psychological Writings (Cambridge, 2014), the first volume of the series Cambridge Galen Translations. He is also co-editor of a major study of conceptions of mental illness in the Graeco-Roman world, Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine: From Celsus to Paul of Aegina, (with Chiara Thumiger, 2018), and author of a range of articles on ancient concepts of psychology, the emotions, health, disease classification, pharmacology and physiology, as well as on aspects of ancient drama and performance culture.