The medicine and doctors of Horace / by Eugene F. Cordell.

Date:
[1901?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The medicine and doctors of Horace / by Eugene F. Cordell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    LS361 on veterinary science) and medicine. According to Gurlt, this compilation occupied some fifty or more years of the author's life, the part on rhetoric having been written in the last decennium before Christ and that on medicine at the beginning of the fifth decennium after Christ under the Emperor Claudius. The treatise on medicine was the first medical work written in the Latin language and the most important one of antiquity after Hippocrates. To it we owe almost all that we know of the previous 400 years, and of the great Alexandrian School of anatomists and sur- geons. Our high estimate of it is not invalidated by the fact that it was written for laymen, or by the neglect which it met at the hands of Celsus' contemporaries and success- ors for many centuries, in fact until the revival of learning in the 15th century. Its purity of style and literary excel- lence render it a worthy companion of the great non-medical classics of the Augustan age and have caused Celsus to be termed the Cicero Medicorum. That it was not appre- ciated by the profession of Rome is probably to be attributed to two circumstances: 1, That it was addressed to laymen; 2, that the profession of Rome was made up almost entirely of Greek physicians. [237J Is it possible to identify the Celsus of Horace with the Celsus of medicine? It would have been nothing unusual, if the young courtier, who had been honored by Tiberius with the appointment of secretary, were well acquainted with medical science, for it constituted, no less than phil- osophy, a part of the education of all high-born Romans, who often found in the ampla valetudinaria,upon their large country estates, abundant opportunities for the prac- tical exercise of such knowledge. Again, to write such a work as that of A. Cornelius Celsus, required access to a very large collection of books, such as he would have found no where in Italy except in Rome. He must therefore have repaired to Rome, if not already a resident of the metropolis, in order to carry on his researches, and if this be granted, L236I Oeschichteder Chirurgie, YoL 1. See also Bjibr, Oeschichic der Rom. Literatur. [237] 28 Celsus, Praefatio.