The medical texts that were produced in the fourth and fifth centuries CE in North Africa were not original research, but translations/adaptations of the Greek texts of the masters of old. The writers would have been faced by two questions: which of the treasures of the past should be translated, and in how much detail? Fortunately the Romans, being traditionalists to the marrow, had a pattern to follow: Latin medical authors in previous centuries – Cato, Pliny and Celsus – had set a trend that could be be followed by the writers of the fourth and fifth centuries, namely a disregard for theoretical reflection, and a preference for practicality and brevity. This approach determined the choice of the author: rather than the theoretical and polemical approach of Galen (129–c. 210), whose discursive philosophical works dominated the approach taken in the East, the Romans preferred the mild and practical approach of the renowned second century CE physician Soranus of Ephesus. However, in contrast to Galen who left an enormous body of medical and philosophical works, the only work of Soranus of which the complete Greek text has survived is his Gynecology, a guidebook for midwives with remedies/ recipes for the most important female diseases.

The author

We know very little about Theodorus Priscianus, apart from his own statement in Physica c. 3 that he was a student of the famous Carthaginian physician Vindicianus (late fourth century CE), the subject of the preceding chapter. This implies that Theodorus was probably also a native of North Africa and lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. We can also deduce that he was a professional doctor. Scarborough believes, in addition, that he was probably ‘a member of the social and economic levels associated with the royal house in the western empire’. The work for which Theodorus is known is the Euporiston, which consists of four books of medical recipes: the Faenomenon, in which he discusses the treatment of external diseases, the Logicus, in which treatments for invisible internal diseases (13 acute and 29 chronic) are discussed, and the Gynecology, which contains treatments for women's diseases. Of the fourth book, the Physica, a collection of magical remedies, we only have a fragment containing a chapter on headaches and part of a chapter on epilepsy.