Central to Don Bates’s thesis about the role of medicine in the Scientific
Revolution is the Greek concept of psyche. This article explores this connection
in relation to Galen. Paradoxically, Galen declined to commit himself to
any particular view of the soul’s real nature, and held aloof from both materialist
and Platonic positions. His medical approach, however, offered a way
through these difficulties: we may not know what the soul is, but we know it
exists, because we can see what it does. Medicine can also reveal other truths
about the soul, such as the location of its various parts in the brain, heart and
liver, or its transmission through the nerves. Different souls exhibit different
“powers,” i.e., causal postulates conceived in relation to their specific effects.
Thus the soul can be a proper object of scientific inquiry if one concentrates on
its evident manifestations, and seeks to make causal and categorical sense of
them within a general theory of functioning. Galen’s stance can be compared to
some positions of Galileo, and even to La Mettrie, who claimed Galen’s support
for his contention that the powers of the soul are affected by bodily conditions.
Both of them concentrate on the evident facts of animal and human life; both
put their considerable medical learning to work to make sense of these facts;
and they shared a common aversion to dogmatism. Though Galen, unlike
Galileo, would make some place for talk about substances and essences in science,
he is in some respects more modern than many thinkers of the Scientific
Revolution in his willingness to accommodate a wide range of modes of physical
causation.

ISSN 0823-2105

© 2012 Canadian Society for the History of Medicine/
    Société canadienne d'histoire de la médecine