“In his introduction to Galen : On the Natural Faculties, translator Arthur John Brock writes of Galen’s predecessor Hippocrates, “Hippocrates stands for the fundamental and primary importance of seeing clearly—that is of clinical observation” (p. xi).* That might seem to be a commonsense approach to medicine, but remember that Hippocrates lived c. 460 B.C. to c. 370 B.C. when observation wasn’t very popular. Seeing clearly then meant adhering to the dogma of the time and to intuition about the way things work and how they came to be. We all know what happened to Socrates when he questioned the prevailing dogma and authorities.
“Darn! I wanted to say something about the significance of Hippocrates and Galen, but now I’m distracted: Don’t you find it interesting that in the previous and current centuries political correctness and fear of mentioning anything that has to do with ‘religion’ meant the replacement of ‘B.C.’ with ‘B.C.E.’ in just about all scientific literature? ‘Before Christ’ seems to have been interpreted as some adherence to religion while somehow being either unscientific or highly subjective. In their effort to secularize time, researchers made ‘Before the Current Era’ a label for all time prior to last two millennia. However, that designation didn’t change the reverse counting system. The originators of the term ‘current era’ still use the birth of Christ as Year One.** Point? It’s still a starting point at the birth of Christ, even though we don’t call time before his birth ‘before Christ’ or the time after his birth “Anno Domini,’ or ‘in the year of [Our] Lord.’ What changed? The counting system remains the same. Julius Caesar still died 44 years (less or plus 4) before the birth of Christ.”
“Oh! You’re so insensitive,” you say. “What about Jewish scientists who don’t think Christ was significant?”
“All right, then eliminate him as the origin of the counting. Replace the current numbering system with one based on some “secular” event, such as the demise of the dinosaurs, the rise of Australopithecines, the formation of the Second Triumvirate, the birth of Maimonides, or the October Revolution. That will make a difference, won’t it? Right. It won’t. Choosing any date by which we say ‘before,’ and running the numbers in the opposite direction, is arbitrary. In the wake of the assassination, I don’t think anyone said, ‘March 15, 44 B.C., a date that will live in infamy’, even though the Ides of March that year initiated some five centuries of Roman emperors with absolute power.”
“A minor matter,” you say. “We simply use two millennia ago as a starting point for our calendars. I was born,” you continue, “one thousand nine hundred some years after a Middle Eastern guy around whom a religion formed, and everything after his birth can be lumped temporally into a ‘current era.’”
“But what’s ‘current’ about two thousand years ago? What do we do with the classification of an era as ‘Medieval’? Are the ‘Middle Ages’ part of our current era? And if we’re talking historical civilizations, then why not go back to the time of the first runes or the first hieroglyphs to designate a beginning to ‘current’? Why not start the counting with the cave artists of Lascaux? Those were humans as we understand our species. Why not designate a separate time-keeping system as ‘D.N.’ (During Neandertals), and the ‘current era’ as ‘A.A.’ or ‘Anno Anthroporum,’ (In the Year of Men), or ‘Anno Sapientis’ (In the year of the Wise)?
“Sorry for that distraction. I’ll address the matter of ‘seeing clearly’ at another time.”
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D., London. William Heinemann, and New York. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1916.
**Though we know that both B.C. and B.C.E. have an identical Year One—as have A.D. and C.E.—and that both start the same numbering system, we also know that both have a beginning year that might be off by four years if Dionysius Exiguus made a mistake.
“Darn! I wanted to say something about the significance of Hippocrates and Galen, but now I’m distracted: Don’t you find it interesting that in the previous and current centuries political correctness and fear of mentioning anything that has to do with ‘religion’ meant the replacement of ‘B.C.’ with ‘B.C.E.’ in just about all scientific literature? ‘Before Christ’ seems to have been interpreted as some adherence to religion while somehow being either unscientific or highly subjective. In their effort to secularize time, researchers made ‘Before the Current Era’ a label for all time prior to last two millennia. However, that designation didn’t change the reverse counting system. The originators of the term ‘current era’ still use the birth of Christ as Year One.** Point? It’s still a starting point at the birth of Christ, even though we don’t call time before his birth ‘before Christ’ or the time after his birth “Anno Domini,’ or ‘in the year of [Our] Lord.’ What changed? The counting system remains the same. Julius Caesar still died 44 years (less or plus 4) before the birth of Christ.”
“Oh! You’re so insensitive,” you say. “What about Jewish scientists who don’t think Christ was significant?”
“All right, then eliminate him as the origin of the counting. Replace the current numbering system with one based on some “secular” event, such as the demise of the dinosaurs, the rise of Australopithecines, the formation of the Second Triumvirate, the birth of Maimonides, or the October Revolution. That will make a difference, won’t it? Right. It won’t. Choosing any date by which we say ‘before,’ and running the numbers in the opposite direction, is arbitrary. In the wake of the assassination, I don’t think anyone said, ‘March 15, 44 B.C., a date that will live in infamy’, even though the Ides of March that year initiated some five centuries of Roman emperors with absolute power.”
“A minor matter,” you say. “We simply use two millennia ago as a starting point for our calendars. I was born,” you continue, “one thousand nine hundred some years after a Middle Eastern guy around whom a religion formed, and everything after his birth can be lumped temporally into a ‘current era.’”
“But what’s ‘current’ about two thousand years ago? What do we do with the classification of an era as ‘Medieval’? Are the ‘Middle Ages’ part of our current era? And if we’re talking historical civilizations, then why not go back to the time of the first runes or the first hieroglyphs to designate a beginning to ‘current’? Why not start the counting with the cave artists of Lascaux? Those were humans as we understand our species. Why not designate a separate time-keeping system as ‘D.N.’ (During Neandertals), and the ‘current era’ as ‘A.A.’ or ‘Anno Anthroporum,’ (In the Year of Men), or ‘Anno Sapientis’ (In the year of the Wise)?
“Sorry for that distraction. I’ll address the matter of ‘seeing clearly’ at another time.”
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D., London. William Heinemann, and New York. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1916.
**Though we know that both B.C. and B.C.E. have an identical Year One—as have A.D. and C.E.—and that both start the same numbering system, we also know that both have a beginning year that might be off by four years if Dionysius Exiguus made a mistake.
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