On Mixtures
Every living body is a blend of hot, cold, wet and dry. Galen, doctor to an emperor, sets out to name every possible blend, and the words he chose still live in ours: temperament, temperature, distemper.
the dry and the wet, and that the four do not have an equal share in the mixture,
has been fully proved by men of old, the best of the philosophers and doctors.
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About this book
Why read it
This is the book where Galen lays out the idea that ran Western medicine for fifteen hundred years. Every body, and every plant and drug, is a mixture of four qualities: hot, cold, wet and dry. Get the mixture right and you are healthy; tip it too far one way and you are sick. Galen counts nine mixtures in all, one well balanced and eight out of balance, and teaches a doctor how to tell them apart by touch. It is being pressed now. The whole first chapter, where Galen explains what a doctor means by hot, cold, wet and dry, is in the reader already, word by word with the dictionary a tap away. Support it and the rest opens sooner.
The lore
Galen was born in Pergamon in AD 129. He started out treating wounded gladiators, moved to Rome, and became doctor to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and then to his son Commodus. He wrote this book in Rome around AD 175, in three parts. More of his writing survives than of any other ancient Greek author. Our Greek text is Georg Helmreich's edition, published in 1904.
What’s juicy
Galen's word for a mixture is krasis. Medieval Latin translators rendered it temperamentum and complexio, and that is how English got temperament, temperature, distemper, and even complexion. The book opens without fuss: that animal bodies are blended from the hot, the cold, the dry and the wet has already been proved by the best philosophers and doctors of old. The same medical vocabulary turns up in our Gospel of Mark and Gospel of John, where the word panel shows what a doctor of the time meant by it.
Why pressing it matters
Making an interlinear On Mixtures is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book 1: hot, cold, wet and dry gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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