Dioscorides' De Materia Medica

Dioscorides came from Anazarbus, a small city northeast of Tarsus in the Roman province of Cilicia, in what is now Turkey. He traveled widely in search of medicinal substances, helped by the ease of movement across the Roman Empire, and he may have been a medical officer with the Roman legions. Sometime between about 50 and 70 CE, by one estimate around 65, he wrote the five books known in Latin as De materia medica.

The work dealt with the preparation, properties and testing of drugs. It covered about 600 plants, 35 animal products and 90 minerals, drawing on his own travels, on oral tradition and on earlier texts, among them the 130 plants of the Hippocratic Collection. In his preface he faulted his predecessors for poor organization, inaccurate procedures and wrong information. The original had no pictures and does not survive; later versions added illustrations.

The most famous copy was made in Constantinople about 512 for the imperial princess Anicia Juliana. Several artists of varying skill painted its 383 plants, some probably copying earlier lost versions, and many still look like the living plants when set beside modern photographs. The book was rebound in Constantinople in 1406, collected Arabic, Greek and Hebrew plant names from later owners, passed through the library of Moses Hamon, a Jewish physician in favor with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, and reached Vienna about 1569. It is now in the Austrian National Library.

De materia medica was translated into Arabic, Persian, Latin and other languages. In Baghdad its Arabic version became the basis of Arabic pharmacology, and in the West it was the source for most later herbals. The National Library of Medicine calls it the most central pharmacological work in Europe and the Middle East for sixteen centuries. Pier Andrea Mattioli's herbal, first published in Italian in 1544, was still framed as a commentary on Dioscorides.