On Medicine (De Medicina), Vol. 2

ix

INTRODUCTION

a Pro. 74.

tinued during the succeeding centuries and contributed to keep these methods of study in abeyance, and it was not until the renaissance, when they were revived by painters and sculptors eager to regain the standard of Art which had been reached in ancient Greece, that they again became the basis of medical training.
The conclusion reached by Celsus himself is that dissection is necessary for the instruction of students^a and in his treatise he directs attention to what, in his opinion, the Art of medicine could then accomplish. He writes without any real knowledge of internal conditions, he treats the symptoms and not the disease.

b Pro. 30 ff.
c Pro. 71; see also VI. 6. 8 E and note b.
d Suetonius, Augustus, 81.

In the introduction to his whole work, Celsus had already noted with approval the views of the Empirics that physicians should not be bound by hard and fast rules, and that treatment must vary according to climate and other conditions; though treatment must be based on experience, difference of conditions caused the experience of individual practitioners to vary^b; he had also noted the division of remedies into secunda favorable/seconding and contraria contrary^c; when the ordinary remedies fail, contrary ones may be employed. An instance was the treatment given to Augustus by the physician Antonius Musa.^d When the regular treatment with hot poultices failed to relieve a pain in the liver, he applied cold ones. It has been suggested that Augustus was suffering, not from a liver abscess, such as Celsus has described (vol. I, p. 415), for which such hot applications were given, but from typhoid