On Medicine in Eight Books

who, by his writings, shows himself to have entered the innermost sanctuaries of medicine, to have cleared up every hidden thing, and to have deeply examined the abstruse matters by interposing his own judgment on them everywhere. You know whose judgment that is: the one who once wrote the preface for Rubeus. To me, it is upright and approved in its entirety. If we look at the prudence and wisdom which shine forth in the treatment of every disease, where, I ask you, except for Hippocrates alone, have you found either more wholesome precepts or more faithful warnings of both? If our author never entered into the matter, how did he achieve this? Do you think that he who never entered the sickroom could know the secrets and arcana of the art—that is, the intimate and hidden reasons pertaining to the health of each person? The judgment of a highly erudite man is that he only grasped these things by the magnitude of a fortunate talent, and for that reason he is to be held as an interpreter of another's work and a disciple and copyist of Hippocrates and his followers,