Galen armors the forgeable shelf

Claim (verbatim)

Galen says men sold books under his name in the Sandaliarium; De libris propriis is his catalogue raised as a wall. But his subtler defense was structural: lacing works with cross-references to his own titles builds a web no forger can counterfeit consistently. The interiority claim: Galen cross-referenced as armor rather than pedagogy, so the armor should be thickest where forgery paid — the drug compendia whose recipes had street value — and thinnest on the anatomy courses that only his own students wanted. Prediction: self-reference formulas naming his own works occur at least twice as often per 10,000 words in the pharmacological compilations (De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos, De compositione medicamentorum per genera, De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus) as in the anatomical-physiological treatises (De anatomicis administrationibus, De usu partium); primary clause: the pooled twofold rate difference between the two groups. Kill: the First1KGreek (Open Greek and Latin) TEI texts of the named Galenic works; the exact computation is a count of occurrences of his own work-titles preceded within ten words by a reference phrase (ἐν τῷ, ἐν τοῖς, ὡς ἐν, καθάπερ ἐν), per 10,000 words in each group.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: self-reference formulas naming his own works occur at least twice as often per 10,000 words in the pharmacological compilations (De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos, De compositione medicamentorum per genera, De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus) as in the anatomical-physiological treatises (De anatomicis administrationibus, De usu partium); primary clause: the pooled twofold rate difference between the two groups.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the First1KGreek (Open Greek and Latin) TEI texts of the named Galenic works; the exact computation is a count of occurrences of his own work-titles preceded within ten words by a reference phrase (ἐν τῷ, ἐν τοῖς, ὡς ἐν, καθάπερ ἐν), per 10,000 words in each group.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Galen's self-cataloguing (De libris propriis) and anxiety about forgery are well documented, but the specific claim that self-reference density is higher in the (forgery-valuable) pharmacological works than the anatomical was not located.

• V. Nutton, ed., Galen: On My Own Opinions / On Prognosis (CMG); Nutton, Ancient Medicine (2004)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.