Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/183

 CHAPTER XIV

WELL-KNOWN MEDICAL AUTHORS OF THE EARLY CENTURIES OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA

There were four men who were not especially identified with any of the sects described in the preceding chapters, and yet who occupied, as authors of medical treatises, very prominent places in the history of medicine of the period or epoch which we have just been considering. They are Celsus, Scribonius Largus, Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides. These men lived during the first and second centuries A. D. and they therefore all belong strictly to the period which is designated in our scheme as the fourth epoch. I shall give here brief sketches of all of these writers and of their works. While Caelius Aurelianus, another important medical author, belonged to a much later period, I shall, for reasons of convenience, describe in the same chapter with the others the part which he played in the evolution of medicine.

Aulus Cornelius Celsus, called by some the Latin Hippocrates and by others the Cicero of physicians because of the correctness and elegance of his Latin and the clear manner in which he puts his thoughts into words, flourished during the reign of the Emperor Augustus (27 B. C.-14 A. D.). The date and place of his birth are not known, but it is generally believed that he was born and received his education at Rome. The great work which he wrote and upon which he must have been engaged the larger part of his lifetime was a sort of cyclopaedia, which bore the title "Artium libri," and in which each department of knowledge was represented by a separate treatise. It is said that five books were devoted to agriculture, seven to rhetoric, eight to medicine, etc.; but all of these treatises,