CHAPTER 10

Pure Life: The Limits of the Vegetal Analogy in the

Hippocratics and Galen

Brooke Holmes

The analogy of human beings to plants is widespread in ancient medi-

cal and biological writing, clustering, in particular, in embryological
texts. But the stakes of the analogy and what it makes visible are raised,
as more attention is paid to vegetal life as an ontological category in
Plato and especially in Aristotle: are we simply like plants, or are we,
in some critical way, plants ourselves? In this chapter, I closely exam-
ine the plant analogy in the Hippocratic embryological writings and in
Galen’s embryological corpus. I argue that already in the Hippocratic
material we can begin to see an interest in vegetal life as defined by
the capacity to attract nutriment and, thus, to sustain life. In Galen,
this self-nourishing form of life comes to define the human at the earli-
est stage of its development, even as the nature of plant life remains
obscure.

1 Introduction

It is a widespread view in ancient Greco-Roman medicine and philosophy that

before we are born, we are like plants. From our earliest Hippocratic embryo-
logical texts to Galen’s writings on the subject, plants recur time and again to
support the imagination of the development of early human life. The sprout-
ing of the seed, the ramification of a young oak, the growth of a cucumber in a
jar, the fruiting of a grafted tree—these are all observations from the vegetable
kingdom that we find writers on embryology deploying in order to describe,
and in describing to prove, what is happening inside the belly of a pregnant
woman.
We may in fact be plants, at least in some fundamental way, at some point
in our development. The status of the fetus and the embryo on the scala na-
turae was a subject of differing opinions in antiquity, as it is today, especially
after Aristotle’s taxonomic ordering of plant, animal, and human on the basis

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The Limits of the Vegetal Analogy in the Hippocratics and Galen 359

of different orders of soul.1 There were those who held that the embryo was an
animal, perhaps a sleeping animal. Others, however, insisted that the embryo
was, from an ontological perspective, vegetal. Aristotle describes life in utero
as the life of a plant; the Stoics believed that human beings are vegetal until the
moment of birth, when proper respiration begins, the soul comes into being,
and the fetus-plant crosses the threshold to the animal.2 Others, most notably
Galen, viewed development in the womb as proceeding by stages—from plant
to mollusk to animal.3
What is at stake in defending the vegetal nature of embryonic life or even of
postnatal aspects of human life, such as digestion and growth? Do these types
of ontological claims radically change the common ground of analogy, or do
they simply extend an analogy between plants and people that, in the form of
a comparison between the womb and the earth, arguably predates even the
Hippocratic texts?4 In this essay, I argue that in the hands of the author of the
classical-era embryological texts On the Seed and On the Nature of Child and

1  Any discussion of development in utero in Greek texts is complicated by difficulties in

translation, reviewed in detail at V. Boudon-Millot, “La naissance de la vie dans la théorie
médicale et philosophique de Galien,” in L’embryon: formation et animation, ed. L. Brisson,
M.-H. Congourdeau, and J.-L. Solère (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 87–88. My
default reference will be to the embryo (typically third to ninth week; in the first two weeks
specialists speak of the “blastocyst”) rather than the fetus, given that for gradualists, the veg-
etal phase is earliest. In contexts where it is clear the fetus, in our sense (typically from the
ninth week onwards), is implied, I use that term. Note, however, that “embryo” here does not
translate the Greek embruon, which correlates best with our “fetus” (sometimes also referred
to as the paidion, “child”) but, rather, to kuomenon or to kuēma.
2  See Arist. Gen. an. 2.3, 736b13 (πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ ἅπαντ’ ἔοικε ζῆν τὰ τοιαῦτα φυτοῦ βίον; cf. 5.1,
779a1–2); for a detailed discussion of the Stoic arguments see J.-B. Gourinat, “L’embryon vé-
gétatif et la formation de l’âme selon les Stoïciens,” in L’embryon: formation et animation, ed.
L. Brisson, M.-H. Congourdeau, and J.-L. Solère (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008),
59–78. For Porphyry, see Ad Gaurum 1.1, 3.2–3.5, and passim.
3  For Galen’s gradualism and the paradigm in other sources, see A. E. Hanson, “The
Gradualist View of Fetal Development,” in L’embryon: formation et animation, ed. L. Brisson,
M.-H. Congourdeau, and J.-L. Solère (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2008), 95–108.
4  For the continuity between the vegetal analogy in On the Child/On the Nature of Child with a
larger and very old cultural tradition of seeing the female body in terms of earth or field, see
H. King, “Making a Man: Becoming Human in Early Greek Medicine,” in The Human Embryo:
Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions, ed. G. R. Dunstan (Exeter: University
of Exeter Press, 1990), 10–19; P. Dubois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient
Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). On the notion of
“seed” in the Hippocratic treatise in relation to Aeschylus’s Eumenides, see F. Giorgianni,