Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last years, many academic publications on the interaction of medical and philosophical issues in Galen’s
writings appeared, along with some investigations on his rhetorical strategies. Nonetheless, a comprehensive study on the role that rhetoric played in Galen’s education, medical practice, and literary production was still missing.The book by Caroline Petit, which analyses important aspects of Galens’ rhetorical abilities, aims at filling this gap.

The fifth book of the Hippocratic Aphorisms represents an important source for the history of ancient gynecology: exactly the half of this book (thirty-six of its seventy-two aphorisms) is concerned with gynecological problems. Some aphorisms (especially Aph. V 59, 62 and 63) deal with obstacles to pregnancy and sterility of women and/or men. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Galen understood and explained these aphorisms, whose interpretation covers a very long section of his Commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms.