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Caelius Aurelianus' Latin translation, De morbis acutis et chronicis, of Soranus of Ephesus' original Greek work is a work devoted to internal medicine. Nevertheless, there are some observations about ocular pathologies which reveal the level of the knowledge at that time about the eye and their use as elements of pathological semiology.

This article collects and examines all references to doctors in rhetorical exercises used in ancient Greek and Roman schools in the Roman Empire. While doctors are sometimes portrayed positively as philanthropic, expert practitioners of their divinely sanctioned art, they are more often depicted as facing charges for poisoning their patients.

The Pseudo-Galenic Introduction (Introductio Sive medicus, 14.674-797 K.), a medical handbook of the Roman period, witnesses the importance of Hippocrates in medical teaching at the time. Numerous quotations, allusions and reminiscences from the Hippocratic Corpus illustrate Hippocrates' authority for Pseudo-Galen. In the light of the first critical edition of the text (C. Petit, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2009), this article discusses the function of Hippocrates, and the various reminiscences of the Hippocratic Corpus, in order to assess Pseudo-Galen's quotation technique and, ultimately, his reliability as a source for the history of medicine.

The significance of malaria for the decadence and the final fall of the Western Roman Empire is discussed controversially. It seems verisimilar that Central Europe was free of malaria at the end of the last ice age, and it is undisputed that the Apennine peninsula was a substantially depopulated, endemic malaria area around 600 A.D. The immigration of three of the four Plasmodium species infectious for man took place most likely at different era and with very different effects on the antique societies. A text passage in the Digesta of Justinian (D 21.1.1.8), written by the post classical jurist Ulpian (approx. 170-223 A.D.), illuminates selectively in region and period the malaria situation of the social underclass in and around Rome, a city with a population over a million at that time. The quotation indicates, shortened, "that an old Quartana, about which one does not have to worry any longer, is not an argument for a warranty for defects in case of slaves bought at the market". From this annotation one can deduce that at the turn of the second to the third century A.D. Quartana recrudescence represented the medical normality for people from the social underclass in Rome and the surrounding area. Thus, while at that time Plasmodium malariae seemed to be a common part of the human parasite fauna in Latium, Malaria tropica and Malaria tertiana did not yet unfold their depopulating, economically and socially devastating effects; this happened several centuries later, although the existence of at least one effective vector is proven.

The Greek papyri of medical content from Tebtunis are conspicuous for their quantity and quality, when compared with neighbouring villages. By isolating another feature in which Tebtunis is also unique--namely, in the relatively large number of those of privileged status who maintained residences and left important documents in the village, it would appear that these outsiders were instrumental in interesting the local priests in sophisticated Greek medicine and in bringing medical texts into the village. Tebtunis may thus provide an ancient example of patients influencing the health care available to them and their families when resident in the village.

A study of all the passages connected to lippitudo and ophthalmia--Latin compilers used these two terms to refer to one and the same eye disease--shows that while Celsus claims to be a follower of Hippocrates, he does not mention some of the explanations which appear in his main sources. He both clarifies and completes the prescriptions of the 'Father of Medicine'. It can therefore be said that the De Medicina is a descendant of the Hippocratic Corpus in the same way as La Fontaine's Fables are a descendant of Aesop's.

The paper provides new information on the most famous centre of rational medicine in the Graeco-Roman world and its influence in Egypt. It uses at its point of departure a remarkable but insufficiently known documentation: Greek literary papyri (from IV/III B.C. to A.D. VI/VII), which often are unique witnesses to lost medical works, bearing testimony to original theories, practices and vocabulary.

The paper deals with the illustrated medical texts from Hellenism to Byzantine age. It refers particularly to the two herbaria of Tebnytis and Antinoopolis, reconstructing the history and production techniques of scientific illustrated books of antiquity.