On Medicine

PREFACE.

I have been led by several reasons to turn my attention with special study to Celsus’s treatise on medicine. First, because the most learned Des Étangs published an excellent vernacular translation of these books, with the actual words of Celsus added as they are read in TargaThe reference is to the scholar Luigi Targa, who edited Celsus in the late 18th/early 19th century.*. Next, I have revised the same work on medicine because the highly erudite de Renzi, a Neapolitan, has made available a major edition of this writer**. However, the more often I read through Celsus, the more I was held by the elegance and brevity of his speech, as well as the perspicacity of his judgment and a sense that is truthful and well-suited for practical application. Through all these qualities, he represents for us the genuine image of a Roman citizen. Nor could I easily say whether he delighted me more as a physician or as a student of literature. If you look at the natural and medical subject matter, the Celsian work could certainly be augmented with very many additions, yet you would scarcely find a few things that should be excised. Indeed, it is not far from being able to be used today as a compendium of medicine. It must certainly be counted among the most brilliant monuments of the Latin language, but alas, we hardly know another book that has been treated worse by copyists and in which more things remain to be amended. These are the reasons, dear reader, why I approached that honest and energetic man B. G. Teubner and persuaded him to grant Celsus a place in the corpus of classic authors, both Greek and Latin, which...

*) Paris, 1848, 8vo major; it pertains to the corpus of Latin authors published by the most distinguished man, Nisard. It is also available separately from Didot.
**) Naples, 1851, Vol. II, 8vo. This edition contains, besides the words of Celsus taken from Targa’s 1810 edition, a good portion of that same editor's annotations, the epistles of Morgagni, dissertations by Rhodius and Kühn, a Celsian lexicon, an Italian translation, a Celsian pharmacopoeia, etc.