In Book XXXIX., 8, 3, Pliny--as quoted by Védrènes--makes the following remarks:-- Very few Romans have shown an active interest in medical affairs, and those few speedily found it necessary to pass themselves off as Greeks. For it is a well-known fact that those physicians who, without being able to speak Greek, attempted to build up a practice in Rome, failed to gain the confidence of their patients, even of those who were not at all familiar with that language.... When one’s health is the question at issue the readiness to place confidence in a medical adviser is apt to diminish in proportion as one’s knowledge of the man increases. Indeed, medicine is the only art in which one is quite ready at first to put faith in almost anybody who calls himself a physician, and that too, despite the acknowledged fact that in no other circumstances of life is an imposture more fraught with danger. English versions of Pliny’s Natural History and of Pliny the Younger’s Letters have been published in what is known as Bohn’s Libraries. Pedanius Dioscorides, a native of Anazarba, a small Greek town near Tarsus in Cilicia, lived about the middle of the first century A. D. (during the reigns of Nero and Vespasian). From his earliest youth he took a great interest in botany, and, after reaching manhood, traveled extensively in the wake of different Roman armies, for the sole purpose of studying by direct observation the plants of different countries and of verifying the medicinal virtues which each one was reputed to possess. In this way he visited, in turn, Greece, Italy, Asia Minor and perhaps also the southern portion of France (the Narbonaise). He collected great quantities of specimens of every kind of drug--animal and mineral substances as well as objects belonging to the vegetable kingdom; and, wherever it was possible to do so, he wrote memoranda of the traditions of the natives with regard to the uses and medicinal effects of these different drugs. After he had completed all these researches and had gathered together all this vast mass of materials, he wrote his famous treatise on materia medica--“the most complete, the best considered, and the most useful work of its kind to be found anywhere to-day.” (Galen.) It is from this treatise, therefore, says Dezeimeris, that one can derive the most satisfactory idea of the early Greek materia medica; but at the same time, he adds, it is not a book in which will be found a detailed account of the manner in which the practitioners of that period employed the remedies which he describes. The same authority calls attention to the great difficulty which modern physicians often experience in their attempts to identify the drugs which Dioscorides describes. Le Clerc calls attention to the fact that the physicians who were contemporaries of Dioscorides were not in the habit of employing either iron or antimony (called by them _stibium_) internally.