Articles

Shock and Awe: The Performance Dimension of Galen

Shock and Awe: The Performance Dimension of Galen

Maud W. Gleason (Standford University)

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, January (2007)

Abstract

Galen’s anatomical demonstrations on living animals constitute a justly famous chapter in the history of scientific method. This essay, however, examines them as a social phenomenon. Galen’s demonstrations were competitive. Their visual, cognitive and emotional impact (often expressed by compounds of ѳαῦμα and ἔκπληξις) reduced onlookers to gaping amazement. This impact enhanced the logical force of Galen’s arguments, compelling competitors to acknowlege his intellectual and technical preeminence. Thus, on the interpersonal level, Galen’s demonstrations functioned coercively. On the philosophical level, Galen was using a rhetoric traditional to Greek science, a way of arguing that involved a unitary view of nature and an emphasis on homology between animals and man. But he was also using a rhetoric of power and status differentiation articulated via the body. As played out in the flesh, public vivisection resonated with other cultural practices of the Roman empire: wonder-working competitions, judicial trials, and ampitheater entertainment.



When Galen invites us to visualize the thorax as a geographical formation, he represents the body as a world of knowledge, and presents himself as its periegete. The body is a metaphor for the world. Marcus Aurelius, for example, Galen’s own emperor, saw the whole order of creation as a body: he compares the selfish and willful man, who has cut himself off from the unity of Nature, to a severed hand or foot or head, lying apart from the body to which it belongs. The intact body is a powerful symbol of organic unity. And, at least to the ancients, the smooth functioning of its component parts under central direction was a figure for the smooth functioning of a hierarchical society. Conversely, the body that has been marked or mutilated, whose interior has been exteriorized and laid open to public view, was a symbol of disturbing resonance and enduring fascination.

Click here to read this article from the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

Sponsored Content