Marcellus Empiricus - Significance As Medical Writer

Significance As Medical Writer

Marcellus was a transitional figure between ancient and medieval materia medica. Although the contents of the recipes — their names, uses, and methods of treatment — derive from the medical texts of ancient Greece and Rome, the book also points forward to doctrines and approaches characteristic of medieval medicine. Marcellus is seldom cited directly, but his influence, though perhaps not wide or pervasive, can be traced in several medieval medical texts.

A major change in the approach to writing about botanical pharmacology is signalled in the De Medicamentis. As texts associated with Mediterranean medicine traveled west and north with the expanding borders of the Roman empire, the plants required by drug recipes were no longer familiar, and the descriptions or illustrations provided by earlier herbals failed to correspond to indigenous flora. Marcellus’s practice of offering synonyms is one attempt to bridge this gap. He often provides a string of correspondences: the Greek plant name polygonos is first glossed as sanguinaria in Latin (1.2), then as "what we call rubia" (1.44); in the same chapter polygonos is given as another name for millefolium (1.28), and identified elsewhere as equivalent to verbena (10.5). Of the dozen or so Celtic plant names, ten are provided with or as synonyms for Greek or Latin names. A preoccupation with naming rather than description is a characteristic also of medieval herbals. The problems of identifying plants may have been an intellectual attraction for Marcellus’s Renaissance editor Cornarius, whose botanical work emphasized the value of words over illustration.

Another medieval emphasis foreshadowed in Marcellus is a concern for locating ingredients in their native environment, replacing the exotic flora and fauna prescribed in texts from antiquity with indigenous species. Recipes in both Marcellus and the medieval writers tend toward “polypharmacy,” or the use of a great number of ingredients in a single preparation. Many recipes in De medicamentis contain at least ten ingredients, and one, the antidotus Cosmiana (29.11), is compounded of 73.

Marcellus is one of the likely sources for Anglo-Saxon leechcraft, or at least drew on the shared European magico-medical tradition that also produced runic healing: a 13th-century wooden amulet from Bergen is inscribed with a charm in runes that resembles Marcellus’s Aisus charm.