ABSTRACT
Jonathan Sawday has recently argued that the Western medical tradition operates with ‘twin fathers’: Hippocrates, and Galen.1 For Sawday, this reinforced paternity has been combined with a view of Eastern medicine that has devalued it by feminising it as a vessel passively carrying Western medicine through the centuries; only in the eleventh century was it able to give birth, when Constantine the African arrived in Italy with a cargo of books and proceeded to translate the lost texts of Galen from Arabic to Latin and thus restored Galenic medicine to the West.2 The image of medical history in the western tradition therefore presents ‘a doubly fathered masculine western knowledge of Greek medicine married to the passive, eastern tradition of transmission’: Western medicine then proceeds by denying its ‘fathers’, in going beyond their medical ideas, while simultaneously claiming to recover them.
