Among the medical books which, upon the approach of the Goths, were carried from Rome and other cities to different monasteries for safe keeping there must have been very few that were written in Latin, and yet these were the only ones from which the monks individually could derive any benefit. Several centuries later, when all the monasteries of Italy and the East were visited by those who were searching eagerly for original manuscript-copies of the Greek medical writers,—Hippocrates, Soranus, Rufus of Ephesus, Aretaeus, Dioscorides, Galen,—it was found that such copies existed in a number of these institutions, thus showing that the monks had been actuated by unselfish and far-seeing loyalty to the best interests of mankind when they rescued these particular treasures from the hands of the enemy. They themselves could make no use of them, being unable to read Greek, but they knew their priceless value to medical science.
The Latin treatises which they had also rescued, and of which they made excellent use during the succeeding centuries, were those of Celsus, Scribonius Largus, Pliny the Elder (to a slight degree only) and Caelius Aurelianus.
