8 Physical Pain in Celsus’ On Medicine

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the place of physical pain in Celsus' On Medicine , before tackling the issue of pain evaluation and questioning the role of pain in the friendly medicine promoted by Celsus in his Preface . In the context of diagnoses, pain is a sign of an imminent illness to be cured three times out of four. The first step towards potential recovery is to locate physical pain. In On Medicine , almost every part of the body is concerned with pain, from the skull to the feet. The majority of the analgesic process found in On Medicine already existed in the Hippocratic Corpus , so that it is hard to outline any Roman specificity in Celsus' work. In Celsus' work, the universal dimension of pain is most of all linked with the different times of life and to climatological or seasonal criteria. Keywords: Celsus' On Medicine ; Hippocratic Corpus ; physical pain; Roman world