Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › On Paralysis
On Paralysis is a short work by Theophrastus of Eresus, Aristotle's pupil and successor at the Lyceum in the late fourth century BC. What survives here is only a brief summary of its argument, of the kind the Byzantine scholar Photius made of Theophrastus's shorter works. It reports that paralysis comes from chilling, and notes the rival views that attribute it either to chilled breath or to a lack of breath.
Brief as it is, the passage preserves Theophrastus's approach to a medical condition through the Aristotelian ideas of heat and breath, and shows that he weighed the explanations of earlier thinkers. It is a small witness to the Peripatetic interest in physiology and medicine.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions. Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).