TO THE READER.

...that barely remains consistent even with Galen as the authority—and this not so much because of the certainty of the subject as because of the weakness of those who were after Galen—it pleased Cornelius, who wrote according to his own intellect rather than the custom of others, to change the precepts of those by whom it had been permitted to delete the tenets of the ancients both in healing and in writing. Although, I say, they move me little, I am nevertheless led, if I am not mistaken, by the most certain arguments to suspect that Cornelius attempted the same thing that we read Empedocles and Democritus did: namely, that he should explain that art not as a pure physician, exposed to all for profit, but as a wise man, as a part of philosophy, joining it with the study of wisdom. For when Pliny arranged the books of his Natural History, indicating upon which authors and witnesses he relied, in the first book, which he wished to be in the place of an index, he mentioned authors and physicians separately. Nor did he ever list Cornelius among the physicians, but among the authors: "From the authors," he says, "C. Valgius, Cornelius Celsus, M. Varro," etc. Then he lists external ones, and finally he counts the physicians, in which the name of Cornelius is nowhere read. But if he had either professed himself a physician, or others had received Cornelius into the number of physicians, Pliny certainly would not have separated him from the physicians in the index of individual books.