nd a considerable amount of medical experience. He wrote not
only on medicine but also on history, philosophy, jurisprudence and
rhetoric, agriculture and military tactics. His great medical work, "De
Medicina," comprises eight books. He properly begins with the history
of medicine, and then proceeds to discuss the merits of the controversy
between the Dogmatici and the Empirici. The first two books deal with
general principles and with diet, and the remaining books with
particular diseases; the third and fourth with internal diseases, the
fifth and sixth with external diseases and pharmacy, and the last two
are surgical, and of great merit and importance. In his methods of
treatment there can be discerned the influence of Asclepiades of Prusa,
and the Hippocratic principle of aiding rather than opposing nature, but
some of his work displays originality. His devotion to Hippocrates
hindered very much the exercise of his own powers, and set a bad
example, in this respect, to his successors.

He was rather free in the use of the lancet, but not to the same extent
as his contemporaries, and he advocated the use of free purgation as
well as bleeding. He never could rid his mind of the orthodox humoral
theories of his predecessors.

(1) _Surgery._--Although Celsus is the first writer in Rome to deal
fully with surgical procedures, it must not be inferred that the
practice of this art began to be developed in his time, for surgery was
then much more advanced than medicine. Many major operations were
performed, and it is very instructive for doctors of the present day to
learn that much that is considered modern was well understood by the
ancients. There is no greater fallacy than to suppose that medical
practice generally, and surgery in particular, has reached no eminence
except in very recent times. The operation of crushing a stone in the
bladder was devised at Alexandria by Ammonius Lithotomos, (287 B.C.),
and is thus described by Celsus:--

"A hook or crotchet is fixed upon the stone in such a way as easily to
hold it firm, even when shaken, so that it may not revolve backward;
then an iron instrument is used, of moderate thickness, thin at the
front end but blunt, which, when applied to the stone and struck at the
other end, cleaves it. Great care must be taken that the instrument do
not come into contact with the bladder itself, and that nothing fall
upon it by the breaking of the stone."

Celsus describes plastic