La contagion chez Galien

Galen on Contagion and Material Imagination. A Reading of 'On Problematical Movements'


Talk by Brooke Holmes

18 November 2024 – 5 PM (CET)


One mark of this status is the referral of several paradigmatic infectious diseases to the primarily Peripatetic genre of “physical problems,” where they appear as cases of “sympathy” (sumpatheia). The concept of contagion in the learned Greek medical tradition has long been recognized as having an ambiguous status due to the challenges it poses to established aetiological strategies.

In this paper, I analyze a moment from Galen’s On Problematic Movements (Peri tōn aporōn kinēseōn) where this discourse of contagious sympathy attracts Galen’s attention as he tries to make sense of bodily movements that trouble the boundary between what is voluntary and what is involuntary.


I argue that Galen translates a concept of sympathy between bodies (that is, contagion) into a concept of sympathy between the mind and the body in order to bring it under the control of his own explanatory model in the treatise.

Galen’s strategic move sheds light on how concepts of sympathy from the early Hellenistic period generated ideas about “chains” of contagious affect that traveled both between bodies and within ensouled bodies.


It also sets Galen up to give an account of how the imagination participates in our experiences of pain and disease that will be of interest to early modern physicians such as Francisco Valles.


To register for this event please follow the link:

https://csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/online-lectures/galen-on-contagion-and-material-imagination/