and has he not handed down to us the knowledge of these things? Indeed, to me at least, Galen Galen of Pergamon (129–216 AD) was the most influential physician and medical philosopher of antiquity. alone seems to have expressed for us not only the powers of simple medicines—both those arising from their primary qualities and those hidden powers which their entire substance conceals—but also the very nature of things itself. O happy, and three or four times blessed are those to whom it is granted to pluck now-abundant fruit from another's tree! I speak of preparing those things which are the two chief goods of human life: to be wise and to be in good health. But I prudently omit these matters and return to my own works, which I would have wished you to have read through first, and to have changed whatever seemed necessary to you. Certainly, I did not dare to propose these very things to be viewed by the eyes of others before I had obtained some certainty regarding your judgment. But just as they had been seen by no one, and thus remain unfinished, the excessive haste of the Printer has shaken them from my hands. For this reason, most kind Claudius, I would wish you to accept these in such a way that, whether they meet with your approval or not, you judge them to have been both conceived and written by a mind most excellent and most devoted to you. Farewell. Given at Lyon original: "Lugduni" on the fourth day before the Ides of January, in the year since the birth of Christ the Savior.

T H E P R I N T E R

TO THE READER, GREETINGS.

Several matters occur which we did not wish to remain hidden from you, because they possess some utility: among these is the fact that those things which seemed to belong to the translator and not to Galen, we have enclosed within these [ ] marks.