Marcellus Empiricus - The Book of Medicaments

The Book of Medicaments

Marcellus begins the De medicamentis liber by acknowledging his models. The texts he draws on include the so-called Medicina Plinii or “Medical Pliny,” the herbal (Herbarius) of Pseudo-Apuleius, and the pharmacological treatise of Scribonius Largus, as well as the most famous Latin encyclopedia from antiquity, the Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder.

The work is structured as follows:

• Epistolary dedication, addressed to Marcellus’s sons, a prose preface equivalent to seven paragraphs.

• Index medicalium scriptorum, or table of contents for the medical topics, listing the 36 chapter headings.

• A short tract on metrology, with notes in Latin on units of measure and a conversion chart in Greek.

• Epistulae diversorum de qualitate et observatione medicinae (“Letters by various authors on ‘quality’ and ‘observation’ in medicine”), a series of seven epistles, each attributed to a different medical writer. The epistles serve as a literary device for discussing methodology, diagnosis, and the importance of ethical and accurate treatment. They are not, or not wholly, fictional; just as Marcellus’s work begins with a prefatory epistle addressed to his sons, the seven letters represent prefaces to other authors’ works, some now lost. Marcellus has detached them from the works they headed and presented them collectively, translating, sometimes taking liberties, those originally in Greek, as a kind of bonus for his sons. For instance, the “Letter from Celsus”, addressed to a Callistus, deals with the physician’s ethical duty in relation to the Hippocratic Oath.

• Thirty-six chapters on treatments, consisting mainly of recipes both pharmacological and magical, and arranged by convention anatomically a capite ad calcem (“from head to toe,” in the equivalent English expression) as were Marcellus’s sources Scribonius Largus and the Medicina Plinii. The treatment chapters run to 255 pages in Niedermann’s edition. Meyer lists 262 different plant names in Marcellus; allowing for synonyms, of which there are many, the number of plants mentioned would be around 131. About 25 of the botanicals most frequently prescribed are “exotica”’ such as galbanum, sagapenum, and zingiber; these may have been available in Gaul as imports, but only to elite consumers. Other ingredients likely to have been rare for Marcellus’s intended audience include cinnamon, cloves, candied tragacanth, Alexandrian niter, and African snails, perhaps the Giant African land snail, which are prescribed live for pulping into a mélange. Availability is possibly a lesser criterion of selection for Marcellus than completeness and variety of interest.

• And last, the Carmen de speciebus (“Song of Species”), a 78-line Latin hexameter poem on pharmacology, which Marcellus contrasts to his prose assemblage of prescriptions by asserting his originality in writing it.