Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

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INTRODUCTION.

When one has imposed upon oneself the task of reproducing a medical work of Greek or Latin antiquity in a modern language, and wishes first to assign it a rank in the history of the art, one is soon stopped by serious difficulties that had hardly been glimpsed, and which fill this first part of the work with doubts and hesitations. Little accustomed, in effect, to looking back toward the past, or—which amounts to the same thing—not knowing how to free ourselves from the yoke of school instruction, and being equally convinced of the excellence of our methods and the superiority of current knowledge, it would seem to us least useful to have to undergo again the interpretation of ancient scientific data. To these causes of detachment is added the obscurity particular to the old texts of dead languages: an obscurity that diverse alterations and more or less serious lacunae infallibly increase, and which certain commentaries sometimes even have the privilege of rendering impenetrable.

Are these, however, legitimate motives to shrink from any distant exploration and, by design, remain indifferent to the intellectual movement of earlier generations? Is modern science truly entitled to say to ancient science, "I do not know you?" and can there be honor and profit in disowning the heritage of one's ancestors? To pose the question thus is to resolve it; for everything is connected in the study of man. If we illuminate this vast field of suffering that constitutes the domain of the art, we recognize the imprint of long and deep furrows, where the labor of the centuries has come to be buried, and which we have yet to dig further. These incessant efforts and this slow progression are sufficiently explained by the very object of our research; and medicine—to which we ask everything concerning the organism, the reason for every morbid state, the conception of man that makes us live and die—by not answering eternal problems, has by that very fact established a common fund of truths and errors between us and antiquity, where the weakness of the human spirit is betrayed, but where its power is also revealed.

The filiation of ideas that one seeks to follow through the ages therefore has this imposing quality: it reports with certainty the medical tradition beyond Hippocratic times. Do you want a solemn testimony? Consult Hippocrates himself, and you will be seized by an involuntary contemplation, thinking that the old man of Cos, twenty-two centuries from us, was already writing on ancient medicine.

Far from calling himself its father, he declares, with his habitual candor, that it has long been in possession of a principle and a method it has found. He invites us to respect the past, and he himself is the first to bow before the "excellent and numerous" discoveries that have occurred in the long course of years. Then, casting a glance at the destinies of science, he adds that "the rest will be discovered, if capable men, instructed in the ancient discoveries, learn them as a starting point for their research" (1).

Thus, without losing oneself in the darkness where the origin of things vanishes, and without needing to interrogate the diverse sources of Greek medicine here, one can hold as certain that Hippocrates and his school did nothing but follow, while enlarging it, the path cleared before them by other schools and earlier works.

This truth, moreover, has been put beyond doubt by a writer whose authority is incontestable in such matters; and it is he who must be cited if one wishes to appreciate the spirit of observation and the medical tendencies of those remote epochs. "It was natural for the first physicians," says M. Littré (work cited, Vol. I, p. 444), "and among others for Hippocrates, to understand and note first the great and universal influence of the agents of the outside world: climate, seasons, way of life, nutrition; all these influences were signaled in broad strokes. Seeing things as a whole is characteristic of ancient medicine; it is what makes its distinctive character, and what gives it its grandeur, when the whole it has chosen is true. Seeing things in detail, and returning by this path to generalities, is characteristic of modern medicine. In other words, to make the observation of the entire organism prevail over the observation of one organ, the study of general symptoms over the study of local symptoms, the idea of the commonality of diseases over the idea of their particularities: such is the medicine of ancient times, and especially that of Hippocrates."

Between the Greek physician and the Latin author who is the subject of this notice, no less than four hundred years have elapsed; and, during this period, one sees the sciences and letters, abandoning their native soil of their own accord, and by a marvelous chance, adopting as a second homeland the city founded by Alexander in Egypt. For indeed, under a Lagus, lieutenant of the

(1) Complete Works of Hippocrates, Treatise on Ancient Medicine, ed. and trans. Littré, Vol. I, p. 573.