On Medicine in Eight Books

rather than an author of medicine in his own right. To which it is permitted for anyone who wishes to subscribe on my behalf; for I do not bring myself to do so. If it were correct, alas! How many authors we would have lost! For from the whole ocean of Galen, if it is permissible to speak through envy, one would not draw as many inner counsels of healing as one draws from this rich stream of Cornelius. I confess, there are more flowers in Galen, as well as leaves: but there is more fruit in Celsus. I pass over the fact that in many places he speaks in such a way that he demonstrates clearly enough that he practiced medicine; in no place does he speak so that the opposite could be evident. The only thing that seems to stand in the way is that Pliny, in his own time—that is, about one hundred and twenty years later—writes that this alone of the Greek arts had not yet exercised Roman gravity, and that in such a harvest, very few of the citizens had touched it, and those same ones immediately