†† Herophilus, Galen, and Bede The fact that Gibbon feels no need to identify these characters both demonstrates the high level of even a “basic” education among the “educated classes” of his day, and is a special tribute to the historical awareness of Edmund Burke: Herophilus is explained in the note to p. 000, above, while Galen (A.D. 129–216) was the most important figure in medicine between the legendary Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 B.C.) and the advent of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. True, Galen based his work on the humoral system: the idea that the body had four primary organs of importance — heart, liver, spleen, and brain, the last considered directly tied to the lungs — that produced four basic fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), the harmonious balancing of which was the definition of good health. But he also made leaps and strides concerning anatomy and other areas of practical medicine so significant that he became the only doctor by whom more than one Roman emperor would consent to be treated. In addition, by telling us that Galen wrote his famous work on dreams “nearly five hundred years before the old man’s time,” the narrator would seem to be making an unusually definite statement that the old man lived during the early eighth century (although he may have been born in the last years of the seventh), which fits with all other actual chronologies in the Manuscript.
Bede, in the meantime, often called “the Venerable Bede,” was a monk who was indeed born in the important monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, in the present British county of Durham, in A.D. 673. However, although often identified (as he is by the Broken Manuscript’s narrator) with that institution, he completed his adult works — most importantly his History of the English Church and People, (A.D. 731) — in nearby Jarrow, at the newer monastery of St. Paul, which one expert (Leo Sherley-Price) identifies as a “joint-foundation” with St. Peter’s. The library apparently shared by the two monasteries was one of if not the most extensive in Britain, and Bede played an important part in translating and critiquing great authors of the past, particularly those of Greece and Rome, and he had a mastery of subjects ranging from music to medicine. He was at the height of his powers when he would have received the visit from the Manuscript’s old man, who had been roaming the Far East, North Africa, and Europe; it is possible, in fact, that the old man crossed the “Seksent Straits”—again, almost certainly the English Channel at its narrowest point, between Calais and Dover — with the specific purpose of seeking out both Bede and the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow. —C.C.
† “Galen the Greek” Apparently unnoticed by Gibbon (or perhaps, again, deliberately ignored, so as not to call attention to an apparent inconsistency in the Manuscript) is the use of “Greek” here, rather than what we will soon discover was the Broken dialectal term, Kreikisch. This sort of shift occurs too repeatedly, throughout the “Idyll,” to be mere accident — it seems, instead, to clearly indicate a desire on the part of the narrator to display the far more learned, cosmopolitan background and personality of the old man. —C.C.
‡ “… from their dreams.” It is both amazing and frustrating to note how very close such early scientific minds as Galen’s and the old man’s came to unlocking the secrets of dreams, and thus stealing Sigmund Freud’s (as well as Carl Jung’s) thunder, at least a thousand years before those pioneers of psychiatry, psychology, and dream interpretation completed their work on the subject: had those earlier authorities only been able to realize that dreams are particularly revealing symptoms of mental and physical disorders, rather than analogous identifiers of disease, one is tempted to wonder how much earlier the development of Western psychology would have commenced, and thus how very different the course of Western history would have been. —C.C.
† “Roma” Again, the use of the proper Latin name for the eponymous capital of the Roman Empire raises questions about when exactly the narrator chose to use particular forms of words, and in what languages, to achieve desired effects: that effect once more being, here, to underline the great learning of the old man. —C.C.
‡ “the Cilician Dioscorides” The narrator refers to the eminent first-century pharmacologist, Pedanius Dioscorides, author of the five-volume On Materia Medica. Thought to have lived between about A.D. 40 and 90, Dioscorides traveled throughout the world known to Western scholars, gathering samples of botanical, mineral, as well as what we would today call animal-based homeopathic remedies, although it is as a medical botanist that he was chiefly known and would be remembered. To provide practical tests of the various cures he either discovered or compiled, he sometimes campaigned with (and may actually have served in) the Roman army. His monumental work, published in about A.D. 77, was definitive enough to remain what Vivian Nutton, in his Ancient Medicine, calls “the bible of medical botany,” one that was still in use “well into the seventeenth century”; and, as we shall see, Dioscorides’ life certainly served as an example for the old man, just as Galen’s did; but the old man was able to include, in his own (unfortunately lost) pharmacopoeia, plants gathered in both Afghanistan and India that Dioscorides had heard tales about, but never encountered. —C.C.
†† the “museum” Gibbon writes, “The ‘museum’ at Alexandria was, in fact, a building that reflected the early and literal meaning of the word, which is to say, a structure dedicated to the Muses, or to artistic and scholarly endeavor. It would be flattering to think that our own ‘museums’ have retained this character; plainly, it is not always or even usually so.” Yet this note does not seem aimed at Edmund Burke, who likely knew the classical meaning of “museum” as well as Gibbon did; and it’s therefore hard to shake the feeling that Gibbon was at least considering publishing the Manuscript, before he received Burke’s reply. —C.C.
† “the patella” Gibbon writes (with the possible end, as stated in the next note, of distracting Burke’s attention from the horrors immediately following), “Here is proof, validated by the off-hand nature in which it is mentioned, that both the narrator and the priests of Kafra knew far more of human anatomy than we today associate with those ages we call ‘dark’: the patella is the Latin classification of the ‘knee-cap,’ a fact that the narrator of the Manuscript — whose expertise does not seem to have extended into medical realms — nonetheless seems to have taken as commonly understood.”
‡ “Roma … gangraena … crurifragium …” As extraordinary as the horrifying detail (both historical and anatomical) provided here may be, Gibbon’s silence on the subject is almost as shocking. He likely maintained it because of how close the narrator comes to describing the Passion of Jesus Christ: Gibbon probably felt (and if so, correctly) that Burke would have already been inclined to view this brief description as near-blasphemous, without any further elaboration on his own (Gibbon’s) part.
Textually, we again encounter the use of Latin, apparently employed, here as elsewhere, not only to further convince us of the old man’s knowledge and erudition, but out of disdain: the narrator’s own contempt for the sadism of Roman punishment rituals is obvious and palpable, and is echoed in the translator’s sudden use of what we now suspect to have been the bitter and perhaps pejorative title for Rome, Lumun-jan. Gangraena, meanwhile, is again the Latin (and therefore, in Barbarian Age and medieval Europe, the official medical) term for gangrene, clearly meant to display the old man’s great medical knowledge; while crurifragium refers to a little-known detail of many Roman crucifixion rituals. Victims of this already nightmarish torture often lived — like Jesus — for a day or even two on the cross, in almost unimaginable agony: as the text here says, almost every joint, especially in the upper body, was nearly torn apart. The only “relief” that the unfortunate prisoner could even try to get was offered by the block of wood placed beneath his feet, which he could use to hoist himself up by his feet and legs. But after enough time, and as much out of tedium and the need to return to more important duty as out of any sense of mercy, the Roman guards supervising the ritual would use a mallet to break the victim’s shins: which, as anyone who has ever broken or witnessed someone who has broken these bones knows, is a particularly painful fracture to endure. The victim would either die instantly of the shock of this final outrage, or, being as he was unable to further support himself, quickly suffocate, the position of his arms having already badly constricted his breathing.