TO THE MOST REVEREND

FATHER, LORD DESIDERIUS, ABBOT

of Monte Cassino, the chief ornament of the entire ecclesiastical order, Constantinus Africanus wishes all good things.

A large historiated woodcut initial 'M' depicts a scholar or physician in a long robe, seated in a study and gesturing toward a book on a desk or lectern.

MANY, MOST REVEREND FATHER, doubt whether medicine is a science or not. While they exclude it from the arts and sciences, they themselves are excluded from medicine, the most distinguished of the arts. For while they spend time uselessly on useless, sophistic questions, it happens that they never arrive at a true and useful speculation of the art. Shrewd men argue that it is not a science—yet it is the very discipline that treats the works of nature more than any other. All the works of nature cohere in the most certain order, and their principles are more certain than others; nor is it easy to find an art that proceeds in such order, where one thing is understood from another. Let no one claim to be a philosopher who does not hold these things, for all other subjects—save for sacred philosophy—serve this as their end. For what does it help to know the mixtures of the elements if one does not proceed to learn the temperatures and various constitutions of the parts, the causes of corruption, the order and arrangement of the limbs, and the rest of such matters?

Therefore, having perused all good medical authors, ancient and modern, Greek and Latin—especially the Greeks, who still excel in this faculty, as in many others, over the Latins—I have gathered into a narrow compass everything that is too diffusely presented by them all, containing everything that can make a perfect physician. Since many things seemed to me written too prolixly by them, and many too briefly; and not everyone can buy the books of all. And if I have achieved nothing else with these labors of mine, and have added nothing—though I believe I have indeed found and added many things—they will at least be suitable commentaries as interpreters of Hippocrates and Galen, and of other writers. For some repel the reader with an excessive prolixity of words, others with an overly obscure brevity. All those who possess a sound judgment will confess that we have held the mean, and I hope no one will justly complain that we have written in vain after such great men. And if I admit that they said well what they said, I still wished to consult the public utility, not the glory of my own name, to which your paternity will see I have said nothing. For I desire to instruct the physician to preserve good health for the healthy, and to restore it conveniently to those who have lost it. And for this reason I have so diligently described the causes of diseases, and their natures, as well as their significations and accidents, for when these are ignored, correcting those things that are acting contrary to nature, and curing the infirm, is impossible.