CELSUS.

TREATISE ON MEDICINE.

BOOK ONE.

Medicine is to the sick man what agriculture is to the man in good health: the former aims to nourish him, and the latter to restore his health. Medicine exists everywhere, and even the least enlightened nations knew how to employ the natural virtues of plants, as well as other remedies that presented themselves, for the relief of their ailments and wounds. It is constant, nevertheless, that medical science was much more cultivated among the Greeks than among other peoples; not, it is true, from their very first origin, but a few centuries before us, since Aesculapius a legendary healer/deity of medicine is celebrated as the most ancient physician. For having shown, in the practice of an art still unformed and vulgar, a little more skill than his predecessors, he was received among the gods. After him, Podalirius and Machaon, his two sons, having accompanied the leader Agamemnon to the Trojan War, were of no small help to their comrades in arms; however, Homer does not credit them with the power to combat pestilential affections and various other diseases, but represents them as applied only to treating wounds with iron original: "ferro", implying the blade or surgical instruments and medicines. It follows from this that this branch of medicine was the sole object of their research, and that it is, therefore, the most ancient.

One may see in the same author that diseases were attributed to the anger of the immortal gods, and that it was also from them that healing was implored. Despite this scarcity of curative means, it is to be presumed that, in general, the health of men remained prosperous thanks to the purity of their morals, which debauchery and idleness had not yet corrupted. These two causes have enervated bodies, first among the Greeks, then among us; and from this comes the fact that all the resources of the art, formerly useless—and still useless to certain nations—scarcely suffice to lead some of us to the gates of old age. Since the men of whom I have just spoken, no one else distinguished himself in the practice of medicine until the time when a more vivid ardor for the study of letters manifested itself, an ardor as contrary to the health of the body as it is necessary for the development of the mind. Medicine then formed part of philosophy, and the same writers allied the study of the art of healing with the contemplation of natural things. This research occupied them all the more because they had exhausted their strength through vigils and meditation. Thus, we see that medical knowledge was familiar to a great number of philosophers, and even to the most famous, such as Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Democritus. But of all those