Editor's note: In Thursday's programme Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussedGalen. As always the programme is available to listen to online or to download and keep.
Galen
Hello
It is all but impossible to believe that this was Caroline Petit's first ever appearance on any sort of radio. She is at Warwick University, currently translating from the Greek a thousand pages of previously untranslated work of Galen. She's translating from the Greek into French and after that she will translate certain portions from French into English. We are very rich indeed in the scholars who come to this country, as well as those who dig in here. One of the things she teaches her pupils is the efficacy of the plant-based medicines of Galen. Still today. She emphasised that she does not give them any of the dangerous ones and has nothing to do with mandrakes.
Vivian Nutton also spoke of that. He said that Galen had an ointment called "The Olympic Victor's Eye Ointment" and today, he said, corner men from the East End of London still use something like it in boxing matches. Galen's version consists of zinc, egg whites, sticky gum and poppies (for the morphine). Zinc is a skin cure, egg white elasticates the skin, sticky gum keeps it all in place and the morphine speaks for itself. Vivian also talked about one of Galen's achievements; that is, working out where the damage really was. A gladiator who fell off a chariot lost the use of his fingers. Galen realised that the treatment needed was not for the fingers but for the spine.
(Oh dear, just heard the call "Lord Speaker!". That means – yes – here comes the Mace, followed by the Speaker, and up I stand and give a little bow and sit down again and continue this dictation from the House of Lords.)
Helen King was going back to Milton Keynes to the Open University where she's setting up a Masters degree in classical studies and Galen is their first figure of study. Vivian did the introduction to a new, epic translation of Vesalius which costs 900 euros.
So, back out to a spring-like day in autumn London. Warned of the cold and the freezing, I am heavily overdressed, i.e. pullovers and heavy coat. Regent Street is undergoing a facelift, which means that first of all there is a face mask (half of it is covered up) and pedestrians are diverted so that stuff doesn't drop on their heads. You build up a sense of anticipation about what will be revealed. Down towards The Athenaeum and I bump into Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society (Nobel Prize winner, etc), and we talk about Galen's ointments, and into St James's Park, irresistible at this time of year, at this time of day, and make for the Lords where I'm going to talk in a debate about mental health. It's a debate I've been engaged in for at least the last 20 years, and when I was President of Mind, for 15 years, I became something of an obsessive about it. One of the problems is that most of the things to be said have been said, but it's important to remember that if they're worth saying once, they're worth saying twenty-five times until something happens. So let's hope for the best.
Big Ben is now chiming eleven. Two new Lordships are to be introduced. For reasons I can't quite fathom, a squad of about sixteen policemen in full police uniform are marching along the lobbies, presumably to go into the Chamber. Meanwhile I'm going to go through my speech once again before I go in and listen to the others.
Last night I went to an exhibition of British painters in the late Fifties and early Sixties who brought in the idea of pop painting several years before the Americans got hold of it and, as they say, ran with it. It's an amazing exhibition at Christie's. And it's very much all my yesterdays, especially as some of the artists – Peter Blake, for instance, Joe Tilson, Derek Boshier – were there.
Best wishes
Melvyn Bragg
PS: A very welcome blast from the past. John Birt, the former Director-General of the BBC, came up in the lobby of the Lords and said how much he’d enjoyed Galen. When we worked together at LWT it was always good to get a tick from John.
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