TO THE BENEVOLENT READER.

A historiated woodcut initial 'A' depicts a serene landscape with a building and a bridge in the distance, framed by floral and foliate motifs.

Many years have passed since the incomparable Christian Frisius, Chancellor of the most august King of Denmark, CHRISTIAN THE FOURTH King Christian IV of Denmark (1577–1648), who was recently received into heaven, an illustrious Senator in both toga and cloak indicating a role in both civil and military/state administration, out of his exceptional goodwill toward me and his high regard for literature, seriously commended to me, while I was tending toward Italy, the correction of the writings of that most serious author, Cornelius Celsus. He did not only testify to this at great length in words as a matter of great concern to him, but he also kindly sent me off, accompanied by a book of Ioannes Caius the Briton John Caius (1510–1573), an English physician and classical scholar, which had once been amended in Italy and was filled with the best authors of every kind from his own literary collection. Not wishing to fail the most ardent desire of such a great man, I diligently searched through the ancient books of the Vatican Library in Rome, and I was, moreover, greatly aided by the codex of the Most Serene Duke of Urbino, but especially by that of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, with which no other manuscript in all of Italy can be compared in age or corrected script. For I observed that those which exist in Venice, Padua, and Milan are of a far later century and almost resemble one another.

Therefore, I worked on this task of liberal obedience in my spare hours; while one or another book still lingers in Germany, France, Spain, Britain, and Belgium—such is the fertility of talent—a new and quite arduous dispute arises among the leading physicians of Spain regarding the Acia a needle and thread used in surgery of Celsus. Standing out during these times in Venice was Senator Dominicus Molinus, a man of the greatest authority in that Republic, a most sincere judge of great talents, and famous for the reputation of his wisdom, who, because of some opinion of virtue and science, had welcomed me as a stranger among those...