Pedanius Dioscorides (c. 40–90), Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843)
For almost two millennia and through the nineteenth century, if you sought information about drugs, you consulted a materia medica source. What might be included in such a reference? Simply stated, “medical materials” encompassed everything relating to drugs, including the study of plants, with their identification and chemistry; the preparation of drugs from plant sources and (later) chemicals; a description of how drugs produce their beneficial and adverse effects in the body; and the use of drugs for the treatment of disease.
In the first century, the famous Greek physician Dioscorides compiled the first such work, which he entitled De Materia Medica. This classic collection—used continuously for about 1,500 years—consisted of descriptions of some 500 plants, contained in five volumes. Based on scientific experimentation and clinical experience over the centuries, subsequent works supplemented the descriptions with more objective information on the plants’ effects in humans.
The use of materia medica remains alive and well among devotes of homeopathic medicine. The origins of homeopathic medicine date back to the 1780s, when Samuel Hahnemann translated a conventional materia medica text into his native German. Finding it lacking, he devised one of the fundamental principles of homeopathy: “like cures like.” Contemporary homeopathic books, following Hahnemann’s example, are a compilation of remedies and “provings” of their effectiveness. They are typically arranged alphabetically by their Latin names and accompanied by dosage information and symptoms they are intended to treat.
As knowledge accumulated, it became unreasonable to assume that “everything relating to drugs” could be contained in one materia medica source, and during the early twentieth century, each of its components became a specialized course of study. Increasing emphasis was placed on how drugs worked (pharmacology), their medicinal or natural product chemistry, and the rational basis for their use to treat medical disorders (therapeutics), while botanical descriptions (pharmacognosy) were scaled back.
SEE ALSO Herbs (c. 60,000 BCE), Homeopathic Medicine (1796), Dietary Supplements (1994).
For the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, scholars in the Arab world preserved the scientific knowledge of the ancient Greeks, which was later translated into Latin. This 1224 leaf depicting a mad dog biting a man is an Arabic translation of the De Materia Medica by Dioscorides.