The origins of general nursing

On sects. The Buffalo team have edited the text (although in certain places I should prefer to smooth out some of the harsher idiosyncratic late Latin), translated it into English accurately and elegantly, and equipped it with a useful series of notes, relating it particularly to late Alexandrian teaching methods in logic and philosophy. Later still, much of Agnellus' commentary (or his source) was taken over and expanded by an Alexandrian Greek, John. In 1185, it was turned into Latin by Burgundio, and was printed in the 1490 edition of Galen's works. Dr Pritchet provides an excellent text of this translation, and his notes draw attention to parallels in other medical and philosophical texts. Two major problems remain; the relationship between these two texts, and their links with fifth-century Alexandria. For Pritchet, the Ravenna commentary is a "first version" by John, who revised it, adding a new and enlarged preface. Yet the attribution to John is so doubtful, and the evidence in favour of Agnellus' existence so strong, that it is better to believe that a later (and different) author (with Agnellus' commentary before him?) carried out little more than a stylistic updating of Agnellus' lectures, to which he added a fairly typical Alexandrian preface. If this plagiarizer was John, his standing in the eyes of certain scholars is considerably diminished. But is the commentary in fact the work of Agnellus? Did he too take over, without acknowledgement, large chunks of a predecessor's lecture? A possible clue that this might be so comes in Vatican, pal. lat. 1090, s. xv. (known to Pritchet, but not to Buffalo), which ascribes Agnellus' commentary to Gessius. This is perhaps the most distinguished of the Alexandrian teachers of medicine in the late fifth century, "whose diagnoses shone like a beacon to the sick". His was a name to conjure with, but I doubt whether it would have been well known enough to a Western scribe in the later Middle Ages to be interpolated in place of Agnellus. If the ascription to Gessius is right, then both Agnellus and "John" can be convicted of taking over large amounts of someone else's lectures to give in their own a situation not entirely absent today from our lecture halls. Whatever view is taken on the authorship, we must be grateful to Dr Pritchet for his clear text, and, still more, to the Buffalo .group for translating this most difficult of Latin into intelligible English and for setting it clearly in the proper context of education in late antiquity. Vivian Nutton Wellcome Institute