Pedanius Dioscorides 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. He was employed as a physician in the Roman army.
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'.
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 Compendium of Materia Medica or Bencao Gangmu (本草纲目) is a Chinese herbology volume written during the Ming dynasty; its first draft was completed in 1578 and printed in Nanjing in 1596. It is a work that lists the materia medica and traditional Chinese medicine known at the time. It lists plants, animals, minerals, and other items that were believed to have medicinal properties.
The Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides is an early 6th-century Byzantine Greek illuminated manuscript of De materia medica by Dioscorides in uncial script. It is an important and rare example of a late antique scientific text. The 491 vellum folios measure 37 by 30 cm and contain more than 400 pictures of animals and plants, most done in a naturalistic style. In addition to the text by Dioscorides, the manuscript has appended to it the Carmen de herbis attributed to Rufus, a paraphrase of an ornithological treatise by a certain Dionysius, usually identified with Dionysius of Philadelphia, and a paraphrase of Nicander's treatise on the treatment of snake bites.
Li Shizhen, courtesy name Dongbi, was a Chinese acupuncturist, herbalist, naturalist, pharmacologist, physician, and writer of the Ming dynasty. He is the author of a 27-year work, found in the Compendium of Materia Medica. He developed several methods for classifying herb components and medications for treating diseases.
Pseudo-Apuleius is the name given in modern scholarship to the author of a 4th-century herbal known as Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius or Herbarium Apuleii Platonici. The author of the text apparently wished readers to think that it was by Apuleius of Madaura, the Roman poet and philosopher, but modern scholars do not believe this attribution. Little or nothing else is known of Pseudo-Apuleius apart from this.
The Morgan Dioscurides is a 10th-century Byzantine illuminated copy of the De Materia Medica by the Greek physician Dioscurides, which covers the medical use of herbs and other natural resources. It is a tenth-century incarnation of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, written in AD 65 and widely regarded as the most comprehensive collection of naturally occurring resources and their medical uses. Today, it is regarded as an early, fairly accurate, form of pharmacological text, in herbal form.
The Naples Dioscurides, in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, is an early 7th-century secular illuminated manuscript Greek herbal. The book has 172 folios and a page size of 29.7 x 14 cm and the text is a redaction of De Materia Medica by the 1st century Greek military physician Dioscorides, with descriptions of plants and their medicinal uses. Unlike De Materia Medica, the text is arranged alphabetically by plant.
Ḍiyāʾ Al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbdllāh Ibn Aḥmad al-Mālaqī, commonly known as Ibn al-Bayṭār was an Andalusian Arab pharmacist, botanist, physician and scientist. His main contribution was to systematically record the additions made by Islamic physicians in the Middle Ages, which added between 300 and 400 types of medicine to the one thousand previously known since antiquity.
Staphisagria macrosperma, formerly known as Delphinium staphisagria, is a species of Staphisagria of the family Ranunculaceae. It used to belong to the subgenus or section Staphisagria of the genus Delphinium, but molecular evidence suggests Staphisagria should be a genus which is a sister group to the Aconitum-Delphinium clade. It is described botanically as a stoutly-stemmed, hairy biennial with large palmate leaves up to 6 inches (15 cm) across. The flowers are mauve-blue to blue, short-spurred, and up to 1 inch (2.5 cm) across, occurring in racemes. The plant grows to a height of 4–5 feet. It grows throughout the Mediterranean. All parts of this plant are highly toxic and should not be ingested in any quantity.
John Marion Riddle is an Alumni Distinguished Professor emeritus of History at North Carolina State University and a specialist in the history of medicine.
Matthaeus Platearius was a physician from the medical school at Salerno, and is thought to have produced a twelfth-century Latin manuscript on medicinal herbs titled "Circa Instans", later translated into French as "Le Livre des simples medecines". It was an alphabetic listing and textbook of simples that was based on Dioscorides "Vulgaris", which described the appearance, preparation, and uses of various drugs. It was widely acclaimed, and was one of the first herbals produced by the newly developed printing process in 1488. Ernst Meyer considered it equal to the herbals of Pliny and Dioscorides, while George Sarton thought it an improvement on "De Materia Medica".
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 Baghdad School, also known as the Arab school, was a relatively short-lived yet influential school of Islamic art developed during the late 12th century in the capital Baghdad of the ruling Abbasid Caliphate. The movement had largely died out by the early 14th century, five decades following the invasion of the Mongols in 1258 and the downfall of the Abbasids' rule, and would eventually be replaced by stylistic movements from the Mongol tradition. The Baghdad School is particularly noted for its distinctive approach to manuscript illustration. The faces depicted in illustrations were individualized and expressive, with the scenes often highlighting realistic features of everyday life from the period. This stylistic movement used strong, bright colors, and employed a balanced sense of design and a decorative quality, with illustrations often lacking traditional frames and appearing between lines of text on manuscript pages.
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.
Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or Historia Plantarum was, along with his mentor Aristotle's History of Animals, Pliny the Elder's Natural History and Dioscorides's De materia medica, one of the most important books of natural history written in ancient times, and like them it was influential in the Renaissance. Theophrastus looks at plant structure, reproduction and growth; the varieties of plant around the world; wood; wild and cultivated plants; and their uses. Book 9 in particular, on the medicinal uses of plants, is one of the first herbals, describing juices, gums and resins extracted from plants, and how to gather them.
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 books.
The Great Mongol Shahnameh, also known as the Demotte Shahnameh or Great Ilkhanid Shahnama, is an illustrated manuscript of the Shahnameh, the national epic of Greater Iran. It is the oldest surviving illustrated manuscript of the Shahnameh, probably dating to the 1330s, and in its original form, which has not been recorded, was probably planned to consist of about 280 folios with 190 illustrations, bound in two volumes, although it is thought it was never completed. It is the largest early book in the tradition of the Persian miniature, in which it is "the most magnificent manuscript of the fourteenth century", "supremely ambitious, almost awe-inspiring", and "has received almost universal acclaim for the emotional intensity, eclectic style, artistic mastery and grandeur of its illustrations".
Crateuas or Cratevas, nicknamed the Rhizotomist was a Greek doctor and pharmacologist who lived around 100 BC.
