On Medicine in Eight Books

anyone who compares what has been handed down to posterity by the Romans with the Greeks will find it vain. Not to stray too far, the praise of our orators was truly led from the humble to the highest point; and the studies of philosophy were so translated to the Latins that they did not even require Greek libraries. Nor is that which Celsus has earned for our art a common thing. For he took the material of writing about medicine from Hippocrates, from Asclepiades, and from many other Greeks, and made it better for this very reason: he was the first to conceive of it in such a way that it was more apt for learning and more prompt for practice. To no Greek before him, as far as I know, was that praise given for having reduced the art into a system and a body constituted by method. Celsus achieved this, and he selected the useful and necessary matters for practicing medicine from the ancients so ingeniously and diligently, and digested them by parts, and wove these same things together between