"All that is known of Aretaeus with certainty is that he was a Greek physician from the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor who describes diseases in excellent, stylistic Greek ... The present books on acute and chronic diseases are all that remain of his works and, in them, Aretaeus discusses the causes, symptoms and therapy for a wide variet of diseases ... Boerhaave published the first edition of this work in 1731 and the present work is a reprint of that edition with an altered title page. It is an important critical edition and contains the notes and commentaries of Pierre Petit, John Wigan, and Daniel Wilhelm Triller, and is indexed by Michael Maittaire, a noted FRench classicist" [Heirs of Hippocrates]