Dioscorides: De Materia Medica and the Roots of Pharmacology

Table of Contents

1. Deep-Dive Articles
2. 1. Who Dioscorides Was
3. 2. The Book on One Page
4. 3. The Natural Sources: From Willow to Mandrake
5. 4. How the Book Survived
6. 5. Timeline at a Glance
7. 6. Later Significance
8. Key Research Papers
9. Connections
10. Featured Videos

Deep-Dive Articles

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1. Who Dioscorides Was

Almost everything known about Dioscorides comes from a few lines in the preface to his own book. He was born at Anazarbus in Cilicia, a Greek-speaking province of the Roman Empire in Asia Minor, and “of Anazarbus” became part of his traditional name. Historians think he probably studied at nearby Tarsus, a city with a school known for its interest in drugs, though the evidence is indirect. His Roman first name, Pedanius, is read by scholars as a sign that a Roman of that name sponsored his citizenship. The usual dates given for his life are about 40 to 90 AD; the exact years are not known.

He dedicated the book to Areius, a physician of Tarsus, and in the preface (as Osbaldeston translates it) he described himself this way: “From my youth I have had an unceasing inquisitiveness regarding knowledge of this subject, and I have travelled widely (as you know, I was a soldier)”. From that phrase grew the long tradition of Dioscorides as an army doctor with the Roman legions under Nero. Historians point out that this is a reconstruction: the plants he knew come almost entirely from the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean, which suggests that he travelled less widely than was once supposed.

He lived at the same time as Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), whose Natural History covers many of the same plants, but there is no evidence that the two men met, and a 1997 comparison of their kidney remedies did not support a close relationship between the two works. Nothing reliable is known about his family or his death. Centuries later Linnaeus named the yam genus Dioscorea after him. The full story is in Dioscorides: Life and Times.

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2. The Book on One Page

The Greek title, Peri hylês iatrikês, means “On Medical Material”; the Latin De Materia Medica is the name it has carried for most of its life. Its five books move from aromatics, oils, ointments, resins and trees (Book I), through animals, dairy, cereals and sharp herbs such as garlic, onion and mustard (Book II), to roots, juices, herbs and seeds (Books III and IV, including the narcotic and poisonous plants), and finally to vines, wines and minerals (Book V).

The preface explains the method. Dioscorides wrote that he knew many plants personally and had questioned local people about others, and he criticised earlier authors who worked from “erroneous gossip, not from personal experience”, as in the case of a writer who had called aloe a mineral. He also rejected the alphabetical order other writers used, because it separated materials that were similar in type and action, “so that they become harder to remember.” The historian John M. Riddle argued in 1985 that the arrangement follows “drug affinities” — groups of drugs with similar effects on the body, worked out from clinical observation.

A typical entry gives the plant’s names, including names in other languages (some of them otherwise lost), a description for recognising it, where it grows, its actions and uses, how it was prepared, how dishonest sellers adulterated it and how to detect the fraud, and any cautions. The preface adds rules for gathering plants in the proper season and storing them. Alongside careful observation, the book also records amulets and remedies, such as the “swallow stones” for epilepsy, that the neurologist M. J. Eadie found in a 2004 review had “no clear underlying rationale”. A 2016 survey of a Renaissance edition counted 5,314 distinct therapeutic uses of 536 plant taxa. The full account is in De Materia Medica: The Book and Its Method.

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3. The Natural Sources: From Willow to Mandrake

Many of the plants in the book later became the starting points of modern drugs. Dioscorides described the willow as a tree whose fruit, leaves, bark and juice are astringent, and recorded a decoction of it as a warm pack for gout. The pharmacologist John Vane, who explained how aspirin works, listed Dioscorides among the ancient authors who used salicylate-containing decoctions for rheumatic pain. The line from his willow to aspirin is a long one, running through Edward Stone’s willow-bark report of 1763, the isolation of salicin and the synthesis of aspirin in the 1890s; it is told on the Felix Hoffmann and John Vane pages.

He called opium from the poppy a “pain-easer” and “sleep-causer”, and in the same entry recorded that taken too often “it hurts (making men lethargic) and it kills.” Morphine was isolated from opium many centuries later, in the early 1800s. His entry on mandrake describes wine of the root given to people about to be cut or cauterised, who “do not notice the pain because they are overcome with dead sleep”, and again warns that too much kills. The anaesthesia historian V. A. Peduto writes that Dioscorides used the word anaesthesia in its modern sense of absence of sensation. The active substances of mandrake and its relatives, the tropane alkaloids such as hyoscyamine and scopolamine, were identified long afterwards.

Aloe appears as a juice that “loosens the intestines” and as a wound treatment; autumn crocus is described only as a poison, “so that it may not lie hidden and be eaten” by mistake. Colchicum entered gout treatment later, a use historians attribute first to Alexander of Tralles in the 6th century, and its alkaloid colchicine was isolated in the 19th century. Squill was used as a diuretic from Dioscorides to the end of the 18th century. When researchers checked 105 plants he called diuretic against modern studies, 56 genera were confirmed as diuretic in animal or human research, 83.6% of those that had been investigated. The full account is in Willow, Poppy, Mandrake and Aloe: The Remedies of Dioscorides.

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4. How the Book Survived

Unlike many ancient texts, De Materia Medica never dropped out of circulation, so it did not need to be “rediscovered” in the Renaissance. Its most famous copy, the Vienna Dioscorides, was made in Constantinople in about 512 for the Byzantine princess Anicia Juliana, in gratitude for her funding of a church. It holds 383 surviving full-page paintings of plants, rearranges the text alphabetically, and opens with the oldest surviving dedication portrait. It served for centuries as a hospital textbook in Constantinople, was restored in 1406, and was bought through the imperial diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who saw it in 1562; it reached the imperial library in Vienna in 1569. In 1997 it was entered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. A second illustrated copy, the Naples codex of the late 6th or early 7th century, shares so many images with it that the two seem to descend from a common source.

In 9th-century Baghdad the text was translated into Syriac and then Arabic, and Latin versions circulated in the early Middle Ages. Printing spread it faster still: a first Latin edition appeared at Colle, near Siena, in 1478 and the first Greek edition in Venice in 1499. The Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentaries of the 1540s and 1550s ran to many editions, and Andrés Laguna’s Spanish translation appeared in 1555. John Goodyer’s English translation of the 1650s was published in 1934. The English botanist John Sibthorp studied the Vienna codex and travelled in Greece and the Levant to find Dioscorides’ plants, work that led to the Flora Graeca. The full story is in The Vienna Dioscorides and 1,500 Years of Legacy.

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5. Timeline at a Glance

• c. 40 AD — Usual estimate for the birth of Dioscorides at Anazarbus in Cilicia (exact year unknown).
• c. 50–70 AD — De Materia Medica is written, in Greek, in five books.
• 79 AD — Death of his contemporary Pliny the Elder, author of the Natural History.
• c. 90 AD — Usual estimate for the death of Dioscorides (exact year unknown).
• About 512 — The illustrated Vienna Dioscorides is made in Constantinople for Anicia Juliana.
• Late 6th or early 7th century — The Naples codex, a second illustrated copy.
• 9th century — Translation into Syriac and Arabic in Baghdad.
• 1406 — The Vienna codex is restored and rebound in Constantinople.
• 1478 — First printed Latin edition, at Colle near Siena.
• 1499 — First printed Greek edition, in Venice.
• 1544–1554 — Mattioli’s Italian translation and Latin commentaries.
• 1555 — Andrés Laguna’s Spanish translation.
• 1569 — The Vienna codex reaches the imperial library in Vienna.
• 1806–1840 — Sibthorp’s Flora Graeca, inspired by the search for Dioscorides’ plants, is published.
• 1934 — Goodyer’s 17th-century English translation is published.
• 1997 — The Vienna Dioscorides enters UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

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6. Later Significance

Historians call Dioscorides the “father of pharmacognosy”, the study of drugs from natural sources, and describe his book as the precursor of the modern pharmacopoeia. Its influence did not end with the age of print. In the 16th century the great European herbals of Fuchs, Dodoens, Clusius, Gerard and Turner were built on it; a 2005 history of Western kidney remedies says it had a deep influence on the centuries that followed, “up to the birth of modern pharmacochemistry”.

Today researchers use the book as data. A 2009 comparison of folk plant medicine in Sardinia and Sicily described the island pharmacopoeias as “shallow stereotypes of the different editions of De Materia Medica”, and a 2015 study estimated that the texts of Dioscorides and Galen “have exerted a strong influence” on how medicinal plants are still used in Southern Italy. The 2016 survey of 924 herbal drugs in the book and the 2019 check of his diuretic plants both treat a first-century text as a source of testable claims, some confirmed and some not. Several of the plants he described, among them willow, opium poppy, mandrake and autumn crocus, lead directly to substances that pharmacology later isolated: salicylates, morphine, scopolamine and colchicine.

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Key Research Papers

1. Haas LF. Pedanius Dioscorides (born about AD40, died about AD90). J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 1996;60(4):427. PubMed PMID: 8774409
2. Scarborough J, Nutton V. The Preface of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica: introduction, translation, and commentary. Trans Stud Coll Physicians Phila. 1982;4(3):187-227. PubMed PMID: 6753260
3. Reeds K. Dioscorides unriddled. “Dioscorides on pharmacy and medicine”. By John M. Riddle. Essay review. Isis. 1987;78(291):85-8. PubMed PMID: 3294735
4. Touwaide A, Pollio A, Aliotta G, Piomelli D, De Santo NG. Medicinal plants for the treatment of urogenital tract pathologies according to Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica. Am J Nephrol. 1997;17(3-4):241-7. PubMed PMID: 9189241
5. Eadie MJ. The antiepileptic Materia Medica of Pediacus Dioscorides. J Clin Neurosci. 2004;11(7):697-701. PubMed PMID: 15337127
6. Touwaide A, De Santo NG, Aliotta G. The origins of Western herbal medicines for kidney diseases. Adv Chronic Kidney Dis. 2005;12(3):251-60. PubMed PMID: 16010640
7. Staub PO, Casu L, Leonti M. Back to the roots: A quantitative survey of herbal drugs in Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica (ex Matthioli, 1568). Phytomedicine. 2016;23(10):1043-52. PubMed PMID: 27444350
8. Yarnell E, Touwaide A. Accuracy of Dioscorides,’ De materia medica (First Century C.E.), Regarding Diuretic Activity of Plants. J Altern Complement Med. 2019;25(1):107-120. PubMed PMID: 30403493
9. Leonti M, Casu L, Sanna F, Bonsignore L. A comparison of medicinal plant use in Sardinia and Sicily-De Materia Medica revisited? J Ethnopharmacol. 2009;121(2):255-67. PubMed PMID: 19038321
10. Leonti M, Staub PO, Cabras S, Castellanos ME, Casu L. From cumulative cultural transmission to evidence-based medicine: evolution of medicinal plant knowledge in Southern Italy. Front Pharmacol. 2015;6:207. PubMed PMID: 26483686
11. Peduto VA. [The mandrake root and the Viennese Dioscorides]. Minerva Anestesiol. 2001;67(10):751-66. PubMed PMID: 11740424
12. Vane JR. The fight against rheumatism: from willow bark to COX-1 sparing drugs. J Physiol Pharmacol. 2000;51(4 Pt 1):573-86. PubMed PMID: 11192932
13. Nuki G, Simkin PA. A concise history of gout and hyperuricemia and their treatment. Arthritis Res Ther. 2006;8 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S1. PubMed PMID: 16820040
14. Aliotta G, De Santo NG, Pollio A, Sepe J, Touwaide A. The diuretic use of Scilla from Dioscorides to the end of the 18th century. J Nephrol. 2004;17(2):342-7. PubMed PMID: 15293542

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Dioscorides
2. PubMed: Dioscorides materia medica
3. PubMed: Vienna Dioscorides
4. PubMed: mandragora anesthesia history

Further Reading

• Osbaldeston TA (tr.). Dioscorides, De Materia Medica: Being an Herbal with Many Other Medicinal Materials. Johannesburg; 2000. Internet Archive
• Riddle JM. Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine. Austin: University of Texas Press; 1985.
• Gunther RT (ed.). The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, Englished by John Goodyer 1655. Oxford; 1934.

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Connections

• Pharmacology
• Dioscorides: Life and Times
• De Materia Medica: The Book and Its Method
• Willow, Poppy, Mandrake and Aloe: The Remedies of Dioscorides
• The Vienna Dioscorides and 1,500 Years of Legacy
• Willow Bark
• Aloe Vera
• Myrrh
• Gout: History and Discovery
• Insomnia: History and Discovery
• Paracelsus: The Dose Makes the Poison
• William Withering: Foxglove and Digitalis

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