# Kühn’s Galen edition publishes the principal medical narrative of the Antonine plague

Date: 1821

## The fact

Karl Gottlob Kühn’s Leipzig Galen (from 1821) printed the Greek medical passages later used to reconstruct the Antonine plague of Marcus’s wars. This Fact stores that epidemic as a received health disaster whose public dated carrier is the printed Galen, not a fake 165-01-01 death certificate.

## Context

Armies returning from the Parthian war are the usual mechanism in the sources. Numbers in later telling grow. Confidence stays medium on totals, high that a severe epidemic is in the medical and historical record of the reign.

[Marcus Aurelius](/people/marcus-aurelius) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

NLM/NCBI-indexed medical history and Britannica independently narrate the Antonine plague under Marcus. They are not a 2nd-century parish register.

Official or archival record: NCBI/NLM literature on the Antonine plague as later medical history (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/; National Center for Biotechnology Information).

## Significance

Health-harm path. Medium confidence on scale, high on occurrence in the received record.

Do not invent a 165 CE ISO death tally. Do not deny the epidemic because the ISO day is a later carrier.

## What is established and what is not

Established: later printed Galen and standard histories record a severe plague in Marcus’s reign. Not established: a Factrail body-count, or that Marcus issued a surviving epidemiological decree in this catalog.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is infectious-disease-transmission. The welfare reading used in this dossier is worsening. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Marcus Aurelius: https://factrail.ai/people/marcus-aurelius

## Drivers

- Infectious-Disease Transmission: https://factrail.ai/drivers/infectious-disease-transmission

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marcus-Aurelius-emperor-of-Rome
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/ma-antonine-plague-galen-print