Pedanius Dioscorides, “the father of pharmacognosy”, was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of De materia medica —a 5-volume Greek encyclopedia about herbal medicine and related medicinal substances, that was widely read for more than 1,500 years. For almost two millenia Dioscorides was regarded as the most prominent writer on plants and plant drugs.
Materia medica is a Latin term from the history of pharmacy for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, 'On medical material'.
Pharmacy is the science and practice of discovering, producing, preparing, dispensing, reviewing and monitoring medications, aiming to ensure the safe, effective, and affordable use of medicines. It is a miscellaneous science as it links health sciences with pharmaceutical sciences and natural sciences. The professional practice is becoming more clinically oriented as most of the drugs are now manufactured by pharmaceutical industries. Based on the setting, pharmacy practice is either classified as community or institutional pharmacy. Providing direct patient care in the community of institutional pharmacies is considered clinical pharmacy.
A pharmacopoeia, pharmacopeia, or pharmacopoea, in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a government or a medical or pharmaceutical society.
Traditional medicine comprises medical aspects of traditional knowledge that developed over generations within the folk beliefs of various societies, including indigenous peoples, before the era of modern medicine. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines traditional medicine as "the sum total of the knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness". Traditional medicine is often contrasted with scientific medicine.
Medieval medicine in Western Europe was composed of a mixture of pseudoscientific ideas from antiquity. In the Early Middle Ages, following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, standard medical knowledge was based chiefly upon surviving Greek and Roman texts, preserved in monasteries and elsewhere. Medieval medicine is widely misunderstood, thought of as a uniform attitude composed of placing hopes in the church and God to heal all sicknesses, while sickness itself exists as a product of destiny, sin, and astral influences as physical causes. On the other hand, medieval medicine, especially in the second half of the medieval period, became a formal body of theoretical knowledge and was institutionalized in the universities. Medieval medicine attributed illnesses, and disease, not to sinful behaviour, but to natural causes, and sin was connected to illness only in a more general sense of the view that disease manifested in humanity as a result of its fallen state from God. Medieval medicine also recognized that illnesses spread from person to person, that certain lifestyles may cause ill health, and some people have a greater predisposition towards bad health than others.
A herbal is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, or magical powers, and the legends associated with them. A herbal may also classify the plants it describes, may give recipes for herbal extracts, tinctures, or potions, and sometimes include mineral and animal medicaments in addition to those obtained from plants. Herbals were often illustrated to assist plant identification.
The Schola Medica Salernitana was a Medieval medical school, the first and most important of its kind. Situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea in the south Italian city of Salerno, it was founded in the 9th century and rose to prominence in the 10th century, becoming the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time.
Apothecary is a mostly archaic term for a medical professional who formulates and dispenses materia medica (medicine) to physicians, surgeons, and patients. The modern chemist or pharmacist now perform this role. In some languages and regions, the word "apothecary" is still used to refer to a retail pharmacy or a pharmacist who owns one. Apothecaries' investigation of herbal and chemical ingredients was a precursor to the modern sciences of chemistry and pharmacology.
Taqwīm aṣ‑Ṣiḥḥa is originally an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad. In the West, the work is known by the Latinized name taken by its translations: TacuinumSanitatis. It is a medieval handbook mainly on health, aimed at a cultured lay audience. The text exists in several variant Latin versions, the manuscripts of which are characteristically so profusely illustrated that one student called the Tacuinum "a [300] picture book", only "nominally a medical text".
In the history of medicine, "Islamic medicine" is the science of medicine developed in the Middle East, and usually written in Arabic, the lingua franca of Islamic civilization.
A monastic garden was used by many people and for multiple purposes. Gardening was the chief source of food for households, but also encompassed orchards, cemeteries and pleasure gardens, as well as providing plants for medicinal and cultural uses. For monasteries, gardens were especially important in supplying the monks livelihood. Primarily due to the fact that many of the plants had multiple uses: for instance, peaches were used for closing wounds.
John Marion Riddle is an American historian and specialist in the history of medicine. He is Alumni Distinguished Professor emeritus of History at North Carolina State University and a specialist in the history of medicine.
Willem Frans Daems, PhD was a pharmacist, anthroposophist, pianist, teacher and editor.
The history of pharmacy as an independent science dates back to the first third of the 19th century. Before then, pharmacy evolved from antiquity as part of medicine. The history of pharmacy coincides well with the history of medicine, but it's important that there is a distinction between the two topics. Pharmaceuticals is one of the most-researched fields in the academic industry, but the history surrounding that particular topic is sparse compared to the impact its made world-wide. Before the advent of pharmacists, there existed apothecaries that worked alongside priests and physicians in regard to patient care.
Medicine in Azerbaijan serves to protect the health and prosperity of citizens of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Reforms in the sphere of medical care and the health care system's direction are parts of a global strategic development program of economic and social infrastructure. This program is based on principles of the establishment of a high-life democratic society with a market economy.
The Tractatus de Herbis is an illustrated treatise of medicinal plants painted in 1440. It is housed under shelfmark Sloane 4016 in the British Library, in London.
The history of herbalism is closely tied with the history of medicine from prehistoric times up until the development of the germ theory of disease in the 19th century. Modern medicine from the 19th century to today has been based on evidence gathered using the scientific method. Evidence-based use of pharmaceutical drugs, often derived from medicinal plants, has largely replaced herbal treatments in modern health care. However, many people continue to employ various forms of traditional or alternative medicine. These systems often have a significant herbal component. The history of herbalism also overlaps with food history, as many of the herbs and spices historically used by humans to season food yield useful medicinal compounds, and use of spices with antimicrobial activity in cooking is part of an ancient response to the threat of food-borne pathogens.
Farid Alakbarli was an Azerbaijani scholar, PhD and professor in history, specialist in the field of history of science, culturology, and medieval medical manuscripts, the head of Department of Information and Translation of the Institute of Manuscripts of the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences, president of the Azerbaijan Association of Medical Historians (AAMH), National Delegate from Azerbaijan to International Society for the History of Medicine (ISHM), author of more than 200 scientific and educational works including 23 books and booklets in Azeri Turkish, Russian, English, German and Italian.
De materia medica is a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants and the medicines that can be obtained from them. The five-volume work was written between 50 and 70 CE by Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army. It was widely read for more than 1,500 years until supplanted by revised herbals in the Renaissance, making it one of the longest-lasting of all natural history and pharmacology books.
