Galen's Germ Line

• In Event: Family Matters: The Stuff of Heredity in Greco-Roman Antiquity

English Abstract

This paper draws out Galen’s unusual place as a theorist of heredity, first within his own intellectual culture and then within the long history of heredity. Among his contemporaries and predecessors, I argue, Galen stands at an unusual juncture. On the one hand, he inherits a predominantly medical model for thinking about hereditary and congenital influence. Within this model, heredity is equivalent to all other cases of material influence that shape a person’s character over the course of their lives, such as drunkenness, bad food, or illness. Heredity is liable to medical manipulation and accessible to medical intervention. But Galen also inherits a perspective on heredity closely associated with Aristotelian teleology, according to which heredity stands apart from all other material and environmental influence, as the process ensuring functional adaptation, species immortality, and good order in the natural world. Heir to both ‘medical’ and ‘biological’ ideas of heredity, therefore, he produces an account reflecting this dual inheritance: a version of Aristotle’s theory of heredity that nevertheless accords vastly more importance to connate matter (the matter composing both parents’ seeds) than either the doctors’ or the teleologists’.

This unusual positioning within his own intellectual tradition, at the juncture between two traditions, makes Galen, in turn, an anachronistic figure in the longer history of heredity—one who challenges the periodization of pre-modern and modern thinking about heredity, as well as the accompanying division between “hard” and “soft theories of heredity. “Connate matter,” understood as the bearer of a “germ line,” is often considered a distinctively modern innovation—linked with the development of “hard” theories of heredity like genetics. Using the anachronistic example of Galen, I argue that its conceptual importance was also visible to earlier thinkers, who—much like later geneticists—read across these two strands, grappling directly with the gap between medical and biological perspectives on heredity.



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Author

• Malina Buturovic