Medical Compositions

among whom he believed every study to be prepared. Being more curious, he demanded my opinion here to resolve the dispute, and not content with voice alone, he also demanded my pen. I indeed obeyed the counsel of that very great man. But, I must confess, I accommodated myself more to my friends than to public censure. My dissertation pleased them so much that they drew me into the risk of judgment not just with frequent exhortations, but also with expostulations. I truly thought it very difficult to avoid this; however, to experience a milder outcome, I zealously invoked the candor of the most famous Octavius Ferrarius, conjoined with various learning. Having confirmed my mind, which had been hesitating for some time, through the faith of a man who was excellent and most prudent—a faith known to me for many reasons—I undertook the thought of a new labor. For after various conversations about Cornelius Celsus, not without deserved praise, he pointed out Scribonius Largus as not the least among those to whom the pristine brilliance might be restored by the hand of a physician, so that he might support his name for the future among those few familiar with him in our age, he who was once praised by the ancients, and especially by Andromachus in the age of Nero, as was also the case with Galen here and there, owing to the elegant abundance of his remedies.

I had already perused his monuments several times, but with eyes more medical than grammatical: nor without offense to the darkness, from which I had promised myself light and remedy over time. But while I repeated the same things more attentively, it is wonderful to say how many things occurred to me that would perplex even the most ingenious. For there was no help from the published books, even though Ioannes Ruellius Jean Ruel (1474–1537), a French physician and botanist, a man of exquisite judgment and well-deserving of medical science, had first brought this writer out of the shadows in Paris in the year 1529 to the great applause of good men, using a codex that, as it appears, was not entirely good: so that some...