Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

INTRODUCTION.

back; and, by gathering the scattered elements of an impossible biography, he arrives by a thousand ingenious detours, and without too much injury to true probability, at representing its author to us not only as the friend and companion of Tiberius, the supreme commander under the emperor Augustus of the military expedition in the East. It can be useful, as one might imagine, to be on guard against this fervor of erudition that leads him to seek in the distance a certainty that eludes all his knowledge, and which he could have found at times in the attentive reading of the work, had he not left reality for a shadow. It is particularly to Celsus that we owe the qualification of physician. To determine the profession of this writer according to the skill he demonstrates in medicine is, according to Bianconi, to oblige oneself at the same time to recognize in him an agriculturist, a rhetorician, and a man of war, since we know that he had written, with an equal knowledge of the subject, on agriculture, rhetoric, and the military art. It would suffice, moreover, to remember that, among the ancients, studies embraced the near-universality of human knowledge. What subjects had Cato not treated in his writings, besides medicine, agriculture, and war? And Varro, deeply learned in every type of literature, had he not enclosed in his own almost everything that one could know then? Let us add, says Bianconi, that formerly medicine was precisely the science that everyone was most eager to know, and the study of which was translated into excellent precepts that one had never written of the ancients. Lucretius, Cicero, and Horace never speak of it except in passing, and almost by chance; it is the same, finally, for Virgil and Ovid.

These reasons, however, more specious than solid, could not prevail against the text; and what the author of the dissertation has best established is that he was himself a stranger to medical studies. He would have recognized it without that, for in the true rights, Celsus intervenes personally, discusses the difficulties that arise, and often settles them with the glance and the decision of a man of war, and besides, some citations in support: Neque ignoro quosdam dicere... quod non ita se habet "Nor am I unaware that some say... which is not so", II, 14. Ego tum hoc puto tentandum etc. "I then think this should be attempted, etc.", III, 11. Ego autem medicamentorum dari portiones, et alium duci non minus "But I think that portions of medicines should be given, and another [patient] led [to walk] no less", III, 4. Quod Asclepiades reancepts "What Asclepiades rejects", III, 14. Tulius tantum est, si satis virium est, imbecilliora auxilia præfero "There is so much, if there is sufficient strength, I prefer weaker aids", III, 24. Ego sic restitutum esse neminem mihi "I have not seen anyone restored thus", VII, 7. In omni fisso fractove osse, protinus antiquiores medici ad ferramenta veniebant, quibus id exciderent; sed multo melius est ante emplastrum "In every split or fractured bone, the older physicians immediately came to the instruments with which they would cut it out; but it is much better [to apply] a plaster first". Assuredly, that is not the language of a simple compiler who is content without ever reserving for himself the right of remonstrance and criticism. But to these passages already cited one

can join another much more decisive still, and which one has inappropriately left in oblivion, since, thus, one catches the author in flagrant délit "flagrant crime" of medical practice. It is appropriate to grant food to the sick only in the morning, an hour when the sick are generally the most calm. If indeed the improvement exists, it is this moment that one must seize, not because it is the gravity of the malady that deprives him of the ordinary benefit of the morning; and that must make one fear that the middle of the day, when almost always the state of the sick exacerbates, does not become more alarming still. Also, in this case, the food is precisely when the nourishment does not add to the gravity of the excitation produced by the intensity of the malady. For these various motives, I wait until the middle of the night. Ob hæc ad mediam noctem decurro "On account of this, I resort to the middle of the night". He will be no more formal; and one understands, no doubt, that Celsus could be at once an encyclopedist and a physician, by the reason that this same universality of knowledge did not prevent finding in Varro and in Cato the austere censor of the republic.
But, in practicing medicine, Celsus did not view it only as a means of attaining fortune; and, a few lines later, we have the proof that he obeyed above all the duties that this profession imposes upon us. One understands, he says (III, ibid.), that the physician cannot care for a large number of people at the same time, and that the best practitioner is the one who does not lose sight of his patient. But those who exercise only for interest, finding more profit in doing the medicine of the people, willingly embrace precepts that do not require any assiduity.

As for the medical doctrines of the author, it was necessary, in order to interpret them in the sense of methodism a medical school emphasizing general states of the body rather than specific diseases, to subject the text to an unheard-of violence, or rather to close one's eyes voluntarily to all the passages that resist this explanation. After having read the profession of faith that is found at the head of the treatise on medicine, one has difficulty explaining the error into which most methodist-historians have fallen, then, led by dogmatism and for the severity of his judgments, he develops the principal reasons regarding empiricism the practice of medicine based on observation and experience alone and methodism, of which he makes an exposition at once personal; he expresses himself thus: "One has written so much on these questions, which, among physicians, have often been and are still the object of the liveliest controversies, that it becomes useful to expose the ideas which, according to us, approach the truth the most. In this way of viewing, one adopts exclusively no opinion, just as one rejects none in an absolute manner; but one keeps a just mean between these contrary sentiments, and this is in general the position that those who seek truth without pretension must take in discussions, as in the present case."