On Medical Matters

AD DIOSCORIDEM To Dioscorides

The third manuscript is the one which Io. Sambucus consulted when he was laboring over a new edition of Dioscorides. I have called it manuscript X, while Saracenus, under the letter V, inscribed on the margin of his edition many, but not all, of the variant readings borrowed from this manuscript by Sambucus. Weigelius excerpted and collated them much more skillfully. Nothing is known about the age of that manuscript.

Nor is it clear which manuscripts these are that Matthiolus cites under the title of Cantacuzenus and the Dragomans. Busbecq, the ambassador, communicated to Matthiolus one borrowed from Antonio Cantacuzenus, a Constantinopolitan patrician, and another from a palatine interpreter (Dragoman translator). It is probable that Matthiolus returned those manuscripts after he had converted them to his own uses, and no trace of them occurs in the West.

The manuscripts which Marcellus Vergilius used in his most learned and acute interpretation were two: one an ancient Greek manuscript preserved in the Medicean Library in Florence, and the other a very ancient one, written in Lombard letters, in which, he asserts, there is little of elegant ornament, but so much more of faith and truth.

Excellent and distinct from all others was a manuscript which the Segovian Andreas Lacuna, physician to Pope Julius III, followed in his excellent emendations. Io. Paccius Castrensis provided him with a copy, but where it now lies, we are completely ignorant. It is probable that it is preserved in the Vatican, which, as Weigelius attests, has six manuscript codices.