No contribution to medicine was made by the Romans. Although the profession appeared among them in the second century B.C., it remained a thing apart, in the hands of Greek physicians.[277] Of the three chief writers on the subject in the Latin language, two, Celsus and Pliny, were not physicians but encyclopedists, who were necessarily compilers rather than scientists.[278] The only writer of importance who approached his work from a professional standpoint was Caelius Aurelianus, and his book is of importance chiefly because its Greek original is lost.[279] This neglect of medicine is explained in part by the fact that physicians stood low in the social scale. Another more powerful influence was the increasing fashionableness of Oriental religions with their superstition and addiction to magic practices. Toward the close of the empire the decline was rapid in medicine as in other fields. Abridgements, which cut down quality unconsciously as much as they did quantity consciously, held the field. Itinerant quacks and “folk-medicine” gradually ousted the lay profession until finally what little science remained was in the hands of priests and monks, who needed a smattering of the subject for the people of their parishes, and the inmates of monasteries and hospitals.[280] [277] Galen was one of these. [278] Max Neuberger, _Geschichte der Medizin_ (Stuttgart, 1906–1911), vol. i, pp. 310–321. [279] _Ibid._, vol. ii, p. 61 _et seq._ [280] Neuberger, _op. cit._, vol. ii, pp. 240–278 for an account of medicine in the early middle ages. Isidore does not say for what purpose he wrote his _De Medicina_, whether to serve as a text-book to aid in the education of the clergy in the way indicated above, or merely in the spirit of the encyclopedist. A number of considerations point strongly to the former conclusion. In the first place, medicine is placed in juxtaposition with the seven liberal arts, and is separated from subjects more nearly akin to it. Secondly, the attitude which Isidore displays in speaking of medicine is one which remembers that this subject was once classed with the liberal arts. He feels called upon to explain why “the art of medicine is not included among the liberal disciplines”, and his explanation is one drawn from the pedagogical sphere; he tells us that medicine is “a second philosophy”, by which he means to say that it belongs to the highest stage of education, but plays therein a minor part. Finally, we must remember that Cassiodorus, whose comprehensive plan of education had great influence with Isidore, had recognized the need of medical knowledge in the education of the clergy, as shown in his chapter “On monks having the care of the infirm”.