On Medical Matters

he handed down the history of medicines, with a few additions which either he himself or the Nestorians who preceded him had observed. Access is not available to the Syriac text, nor to the Arabic version which Hodaithus had established; I use only the Latin-barbarian translation, completed by Abraham, a Jew of Tortosa, which appeared at Lyon in 1525 in a larger square format. Although many passages are excellently illustrated in it, the names of regions and cities are so corrupted that they require an Oedipus a reference to the mythical solver of riddles to interpret them.

After the rebirth of letters, Hermolaus Barbarus, a Venetian orator and Patriarch of Aquileia, contributed not a few things to illustrating our author. For he himself testifies that he has applied all that he was able to achieve by wit, all that he could elaborate by industry, all that he could attain by study and care, and finally all the judgment he possessed in literature, to these books. He wrote Corollaria Additions/Supplements to Dioscorides, the Cologne edition of 1530 of which I have before me.

The interpreter Marcellus Vergilius, Master of Letters of the Florentine Republic, was most learned and acute. It cannot be said in a few words how praiseworthy is the work he applied to explaining and correcting the text of Dioscorides. He added very sagacious conjectures and sometimes learned excursions, by which other authors are illustrated here and there. I use the Cologne edition of 1529 in a larger format.

Nor is the work of Io. Ruellius of Soissons to be spurned in correcting the ancient translations. We have his new and sufficiently emended version in its entirety in the Goupyl edition, Paris, 1540.

The effort of Io. Manardus of Ferrara is to be valued less, because he placed all his effort into refuting Marcellus, certainly an unhappy decision, since he opposes a nearly common codex, of no great quality, to the most acute corrections of Marcellus. His letters, published at Lyon in 1549 in octavo format, contain these annotations.