author
Aulus Cornelius Celsus
Best known for the surviving medical work De Medicina, this Roman encyclopedist preserved a remarkably clear picture of ancient medicine. His writing helped carry Greek medical ideas into Latin and remained influential for centuries.
1 Audiobook
Of Medicine, in Eight Books
by Aulus Cornelius Celsus
About the author
Little is known for certain about the life of Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who is generally placed in the early Roman Empire, around the late 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE. He is remembered as a learned compiler and writer rather than as a physician with a well-documented personal history.
Celsus wrote a large encyclopedia covering several fields, including agriculture, military art, rhetoric, philosophy, law, and medicine. Only the medical section, De Medicina, survives, but that alone made his name endure. The work is valued for its orderly style and for preserving important information about diet, drugs, surgery, and the medical thinking of the Roman world.
Readers today often meet Celsus as one of the great transmitters of classical knowledge. De Medicina was admired for its Latin prose as well as its practical detail, and it remains a key source for understanding ancient medicine.