Asclepiades

, an ancient physician, was a native gf Prusa, in Bithynia, and contemporary with Mithridates (about the year 110 B.C.), to whose court ne refused to go, when invited by magnificent promises. He first went to Rome, to teach rhetoric, but not finding much encouragement, he began to practise physic, of which he had little knowledge, and to conceal his ignorance, affected to | condemn the medicines and modes of practice then in use. He confined himself to such remedies as were simple and palatable, and soon was considered as a favourite practitioner. He appears from Pliny’s account to have been much of the quack, and occasionally sufficiently bold and adventurous in his prescriptions. He desired, among other boasts, that he might not be considered as a physician, if ever he were sick and his reputation perhaps was not lessened in this respect, by his being killed by a fall. He wrote several books quoted by Pliny, Celsus, and Galen, but fragments only remain, of which an edition was published by Jumpert, under the title “Malagmata hydropica, &c.” Weimar, 1794, 8vo. ¹