Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/114

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE In the last pre-Christian centuries Greek medicine reached Rome. The native Roman practice had been of the homeliest^ and accom- panied always with a dose of superstition. For our purpose it is quite negligible. But some of the Latins, in medicine as well as literature, were capable of learning. Such a one was the exceedingly intelligent Celsus who, in the first half of the first Christian century, composed or translated an admirable hand-book of medi- cine and surgery. Whatever the sources of his materials were, he was a man of sense and dis- crimination, and wrote a Latin that assured his book an enthusiastic reception with the Hu- manists when it was re-discovered in the fifteenth century. It was printed at Florence in the year 1478, before the works of either Galen or Hippocrates. Celsus knew the history of medicine, and in his Introduction aptly describes the sects of his time. He speaks of the Empirics, who would have nothing to do with the remote and hidden causes of disease, seeing that men always had differed regarding them; only the obvious causes were to be considered and treated. The Empirics were interested in the cure rather than in the cause. Opposed to them were those [92]