Complete Works of Celsus, Vitruvius, Censorinus, and Frontinus

CELSE.

digestion occurs, and knowing what digests best, whatever the manner in which this function is accomplished, by concoction or by simple dissolution. Instead of questioning the causes of respiration, it is preferable to seek the means to make its difficulty and slowness cease; and, rather than asking oneself on what the beating of the arteries depends, it is appropriate to study the value of the signs provided by the varieties of the pulse. Now, these notions come to us from experience. In all discussions of this kind, one can discourse equally for and against, and triumph through one's wit and eloquence; diseases, however, are not cured with beautiful words, but with the help of medications. A man deprived of the gift of expression, but versed in practice, would certainly be a greater physician than if he had cultivated the art of speaking well without relying on experience. Thus far, these various theories are only useless; but what is cruel is to open the entrails of living men and to make an art that preserves human life the instrument of an atrocious death, especially when the questions that one tries to resolve with the help of these frightful violences either remain completely insoluble or could be clarified without crime. For the color, the polish, the softness, the hardness, and the other conditions of the organs do not remain, on the subject one has just opened, what they were before the incisions. Since in those who do not have to suffer them, fear, pain, hunger, indigestion, fatigue, and a thousand other slight inconveniences often come to modify all these characteristics, it is much more to be believed that the internal parts, endowed with a greater delicacy, and which are not called to receive the light, will be deeply altered by such grave wounds and such violent death. What folly to imagine that, on the dying or already dead man, things will remain the same as during life! It is true that one can open the abdomen of a living man, which contains less important organs; but as soon as the scalpel, in moving up toward the chest, has divided the transverse partition (the diaphragma diaphragm of the Greeks) which separates the upper parts from the lower, this man will give up the ghost at the very instant. It is thus that the homicidal physician manages to discover the viscera of the chest and the belly; but they present themselves to him as death has made them, and no longer as they were when living: so that he has indeed been able to slaughter his fellow man with barbarity, but not to know in what condition our organs are when life animates them. If there are some, however, that the gaze can penetrate before death, does not chance often offer them to the physician? The gladiator in the arena, the soldier in combat, the traveler assaulted by brigands, are they not sometimes reached by wounds that allow one to see the interior of such a part in one, such another in another? So that, without failing in prudence, the practitioner can appreciate the seat, the position, the arrangement, the form, and the other qualities of the organs, all while having as his goal not murder, but healing; and in this way, he owes only to his humanity the lights that others obtain only through pitiless acts. These reasons lead one to regard even the dissection of...