Galen on the Question of Metabolism
Galen on the Question
of Metabolism
Body and Environment
in Ancience Medicine
Chiara Thumiger
27 May 2025 – 5 PM (CEST)
In current medical-biological understanding, metabolism can be briefly defined as the combination of chemical reactions within the body’s cells which are aimed at changing food into energy.
In this sense, ancient medicine was cognisant of metabolism (despite being devoid of any concept of cellular physiology), and intended it as the challenging process of transforming food and drink into ‘body’.
Focusing on Galen, in this talk I intend to explore metabolism as concept of history of biology, using that datum as starting point for the exploration of a wider metaphorical level: the regulation of the relationship, material as much as conceptual, between self and non-self, and between human and environment (consumption and dietetics, processing, travel, trade, analogy and similarity).
These are equally important in the tradition of Hellenic medicine, and in the writings of Galen of Pergamon, who was fond of environmental imagery in his rhetorical presentation of medical doctrines.
About the Speaker ...
Chiara Thumiger is a researcher in the Cluster of Excellence Roots at the CAU University, Kiel and Humboldt Universität, Berlin.
She focuses on ancient Greek and Roman thought and literature, the history of ancient medicine and the history of psychiatry, as well as on environmental and comparative approaches to anthropology of medicine and body history. She is the author of A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017), editor of Holism in Ancient Medicine and its Reception (Brill 2020) and Phrenitis and the Pathology of the Mind in Western Medical Thought (Fifth Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE) (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
