Medical Compositions

or even consider him a too-bold restorer of Scribonius. Andreas Cratander immediately printed an example of this in Basel. Nor did Aldus Aldus Manutius the Younger, otherwise most diligent, add it to Latin physicians with better faith in the twenty-eighth year 1528 without an index of the Compositiones Compounded Medicines. Henricus Stephanus Henri Estienne, the famous printer also, twenty years after this, added it to the princes of medical art, not in the least more corrected, though divided into chapters with little accuracy, if you except the Greek terms, of which he was knowledgeable beyond the common lot of their times, and some light punctuations, in which you might also desire something; but it is worthy of pardon, since that whole study depends not so much on genius and knowledge of the Latin language as on the profession of medicine. There was certainly great hope in the earlier writings of Ruellius, after I had solicited the more famous libraries of Europe in vain. But no evidence of them, except for the Letter to Julius Callistus prefixed to the Marcellus Empiricus 4th-century Roman physician written on parchment, appeared with any amount of skill until this day. But the project concerning the Own Books mentioned by Ioannes Caius in amending Largus was either interrupted by fate or overturned by the lesser care of posterity. One defense, therefore, remained from genius, to which it seemed possible to resolve so many difficulties through artificial conjecture. To this effort was added a talent inclined toward this genre of letters, which, through long use of ancient books, had already perceived the various causes of so many errors with which most of them are disgracefully infested.

For the sake of saving money, many scribes, depending on the voice of one, not rarely interchanged words similar in sound due to their pronunciation, and sometimes transformed vowels not accurately enough; sometimes the final syllables were repeated...