Soranus is known by a work, still extant in the Greek original, on the diseases of women, and also by the Latin work of Caelius Aurelianus, three centuries later, on acute and chronic diseases, which is based upon, if not, as some think, an actual translation of, the chief work of Soranus, and which is the principal source of our knowledge of the methodic school.
This doctrine, crudely transferred from philosophical speculation, was intended to reconcile the humoral (or Hippocratic) and solidist (or methodic) schools; but the methodists seem to have claimed Athenaeus as one of themselves.
It was on this field that he most vehemently attacked the prevailing atomistic and materialistic views of the methodic school, and his conception of the pneuma became in some respects half metaphysical.
For some centuries the methodic school was popular at Rome, and produced one physician, Caelius Aurelianus, who must be pronounced, next to Celsus, the most considerable of the Latin medical writers.
Caelius Aurelianus, already referred to as the follower of Soranus, must be mentioned as showing the persistence of the methodic school.
