25 B.C.-A.D. 50

Roman Medical Writer

Aulus Cornelius Celsus has been called the first important medical historian and one of the greatest Roman medical writers, as well as the creator of scientific Latin. He seems to have written an encyclopaedia dealing with agriculture, the art of warfare, rhetoric, philosophy, law, and medicine, but only the treatise known as De medicina (On medicine) survived. Today De medicina is universally regarded as an invaluable medical classic.

Yet almost nothing is known about the life of Celsus. Even his status as author of De medicina has been questioned. Because Celsus wrote in Latin, during an era in which Greek was considered the language of medicine and scholarship, Roman and medieval scholars ignored his work. In the fifteenth century two copies of De medicina were discovered. To Renaissance scholars, Celsus represented a pure source of first-century Latin...