author
Aulus Cornelius Celsus
Best known for the surviving medical work De Medicina, this Roman writer offers one of the clearest windows into ancient medicine. His pages preserve practical detail on diet, drugs, and surgery that later generations would study for centuries.
1 Audiobook
Of Medicine, in Eight Books
by Aulus Cornelius Celsus
About the author
Aulus Cornelius Celsus was a Roman encyclopedist who flourished in the early 1st century CE. Although little is known for certain about his life, he is remembered above all for De Medicina, the only substantial part of his larger encyclopedia to survive.
That work became one of the most important Latin sources on ancient medicine. It covers subjects such as hygiene, diet, pharmacology, and surgery, and it is especially valued because it preserves knowledge from earlier Greek medical traditions in clear, disciplined prose.
Modern readers often meet Celsus not as a practicing physician, but as a careful compiler and elegant writer whose work helped carry classical medical knowledge into later centuries. Even with so much of his encyclopedia lost, his surviving text remains a landmark in the history of science and medicine.