Roadmap

The goal is simple to say and long to do: get the untranslated Galen into readable English, in public, with the source text alongside every claim.

How we pick targets

• No existing English. We don't duplicate the Loeb, CMG, or other published translations — the atlas exists partly so effort goes where nothing exists.
• A digitized source text. Machine-readable Greek (or a published Arabic edition) so work can start immediately, with the original published next to the translation.
• Bounded and self-contained. A book or treatise that can actually be finished, not an open-ended slog.
• Human interest. Texts that show ancient life — recipes, patients, prices, complaints — over technical scaffolding, at least at first.

Phase 0 — Map the corpus live now

Publish the atlas, with translation status flagged by confidence, and open it to corrections. The unglamorous foundation: you can't plan a rescue without a map.

Phase 1 — Pilot: the hair & scalp book begun

Book 1 of On the Composition of Drugs According to Places (Kühn XII 378–497): Galen's remedies for baldness, falling hair, hair dye, depilatories, dandruff, lice, and scalp sores — ten chapters, self-contained, vivid, and never in English. The preface is translated; nine chapters of actual recipes follow, chunk by chunk.

Phase 2 — First full campaign vote open

The first sustained, multi-book translation effort, chosen by public vote. Candidates on the ballot:

• On the Composition of Drugs According to Places — continue past Book 1 (eyes, ears, teeth, chest… ten books of ancient pharmacy).
• On Antidotes — theriac, mithridatium, and the emperor's daily dose; the founding text of the antidote tradition.
• The pulse tetralogy — sixteen books that built a thousand years of diagnosis by pulse, none in English.
• On Crises — how a Roman doctor predicted the turning point of a disease.
• On the Differences of Fevers — the fever theory that ruled medicine into the 19th century.

Cast your vote →

Phase 3 — The Arabic frontier later

Works lost in Greek that survive in the Arabic of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's ninth-century Baghdad workshop — some translated by scholars already, some (like On Medical Names) still without English. These need published Arabic editions and more careful hands; they come after the pipeline is proven on Greek.

How a campaign runs

1. The source text is split into chunks — passages anchored to Kühn page numbers.
2. Each chunk gets a draft English translation (AI-assisted), comparing every surviving witness as peers — the Greek, Kühn's facing Latin, and the Arabic tradition where it exists — with each consultation cited.
3. Draft, source text, the translator's reasoning traces (the working, shown LLM-style), and notes are published side by side, flagged as a draft until a human reviewer signs off.
4. Anyone can challenge a rendering by opening an issue pointing at the Greek — the fastest way to improve the text.

Details for contributors: CONTRIBUTING.md.