This book presents the first ever English translation of the Medicina Plinii, one of the most influential books of applied medicine and self-medication in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The work, which predates AD 400, was created as a quick reference work for travellers, and became and remained highly influential, as witnessed by frequent references to it and by various later adaptations. Only the rise of scientific medicine and pharmacology led to its demise and confinement in a small corner of specialist studies. It presents more than 1,150 healing methods and recipes mainly adapted from the encyclopedic Natural History of Pliny the Elder, arranged from the patient’s head to foot in order that readers could quickly find treatments for their diseases. The Medicina Plinii is of dual interest to present-day scholarship: The book is a monument for the practical application of classical knowledge which has recently found lively interest in the history of science and medicine. At the same time the Medicina Plinii provides a fascinating insight into the realities of the world of Late Antiquity, and into the anxieties of the people living in the vast Roman empire. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students in the History of Science and Medicine, along with a wider audience interested in medicine, and in life in the Roman world.

Considered one of the best of the single-volume histories of medicine.

A. Cornelius Celsus was author, probably during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE), of a general encyclopaedia of agriculture, medicine, military arts, rhetoric, philosophy, and jurisprudence, in that order of subjects. Of all this great work there survives only the 8 books on medicine (De Medicina). Book I: after an excellent survey of Greek schools (Dogmatic, Methodic, Empiric) of medicine come sensible dietetics or health preservation which will always be applicable. Book II: deals with prognosis, diagnosis of symptoms (which he stresses strongly), and general therapeutics. Book III: internal ailments: fevers and general diseases. Book IV: local bodily diseases. Next come two pharmacological books, Book V: treatment by drugs of general diseases; and Book VI: of local diseases. Book VII and Book VIII deal with surgery; these books contain accounts of many operations, including amputation. Celsus was not a professional doctor of medicine or a surgeon, but a practical layman whose On Medicine, written in a clear and neat style, for lay readers, is partly a result of his medical treatment of his household (slaves included) and partly a presentation of information gained from many Greek authorities. From no other source can we learn so much of the condition of medical science up to his own time. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Celsus is in three volumes.