Pelavski Andres, Marroquin-Arroyave Esteban, Milgram Joshua, Lewis Orly
Department of Classics, Faculty of Humanities. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 9190501, Israel.
Department of Anaesthesia, Vall d'Hebron University Hospital, Barcelona 08035, Spain.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Dec 10;121(50):e2416336121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2416336121. Epub 2024 Dec 2.
Unlike traditional approaches to Greco-Roman medicine, which are strongly based on textual evidence, we addressed some problems, currently debated by historians, through a technique borrowed from the biological sciences: We reenacted an ancient anatomical dissection of the abdominal wall, the peritoneal cavity, and its organs (as described by Galen during the 2nd century CE, in his major treatise Anatomical Proceedings). Our aim was to clarify incongruencies about the text itself-considering the errors generated during its 14-century-long hand-copied manuscript tradition-and infer answers to contextual questions, such as the aim of the author, his audience, and the setting where the dissections took place. This hands-on practical method provided extratextual evidence to ongoing scholarly debates, which until now were mainly approached through textual scrutiny.
与严重依赖文本证据的传统希腊罗马医学研究方法不同，我们通过借鉴生物科学的一项技术，解决了目前历史学家们正在争论的一些问题：我们重现了古代对腹壁、腹腔及其器官的解剖过程（正如公元2世纪盖伦在其主要论著《解剖学程序》中所描述的那样）。我们的目的是澄清文本本身存在的不一致之处——考虑到其长达14个世纪的手抄本传承过程中产生的错误——并推断出对一些背景问题的答案，比如作者的目的、他的受众以及解剖进行的场景。这种实践方法为正在进行的学术辩论提供了文本之外的证据，而到目前为止，这些辩论主要是通过文本审查来进行的。
