De Materia Medica: The Book and Its Method

Some time between about 50 and 70 AD, a Greek-speaking physician named Pedanius Dioscorides finished a book in five parts about the medicines that come from nature — from plants above all, but also from animals, wines and minerals. He called it, in Greek, “On Medical Material”. In its Latin form, De Materia Medica, it became one of the most copied and most consulted medical books ever written, read for some 1,500 years. Historians describe it as a founding text of pharmacology and of pharmacognosy, the study of medicines drawn from natural sources.

This page is about the book itself: what it is called and when it was written, how its five books are laid out, how many plants and medicines it holds, what Dioscorides said in his preface about his rivals and about his own method, why he refused to put his plants in alphabetical order, how a single entry is built, how he taught readers to catch a counterfeit drug, his rules for gathering and storing herbs, and the folklore that sits beside his careful observation. The man behind the book, the best-known remedies and the manuscripts that carried it through the centuries each have their own page in this wing.

Table of Contents

  1. Title, Date and Language
  2. Five Books at a Glance
  3. Six Hundred Plants, a Thousand Medicines
  4. The Preface: Experience over Gossip
  5. Why Not Alphabetical? Drug Affinities
  6. Anatomy of an Entry
  7. Spotting Counterfeits: Adulteration Tests
  8. Gathering and Storing Herbs
  9. Minerals, Animals and Foreign Names
  10. Observation and Superstition Side by Side
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections
  13. Featured Videos

1. Title, Date and Language

The book’s Greek title is Peri hylēs iatrikēs (Περιῷ ὕλης ιατρικῆς), which means “On Medical Material”. The word hylē means matter or raw material, and the title captures exactly what the book is: a catalogue of the raw materials from which medicines were made, rather than a treatise on diseases or on theories of the body. Latin readers knew it as De materia medica, and the phrase “materia medica” itself became the standard name, for many centuries, of the whole subject of medicinal substances — the field that later grew into pharmacology.

Dioscorides wrote in Greek, the language of learned medicine across the eastern Roman Empire, even though he lived under Roman rule and carried a Roman first name. The exact year of writing is not known. The usual estimate is between about 50 and 70 AD, in the reigns of Nero and Vespasian. Within that range, scholars have proposed particular years: the translator T. A. Osbaldeston gives about 64 AD and notes that Pritzel preferred 77 AD; the horticultural historians Janick and Stolarczyk write that it was composed “about the year 65”. None of these dates rests on a firm record, and it is safest to say only that the book belongs to the third quarter of the first century.

The work is dedicated to Areius, a physician of Tarsus whom Dioscorides addresses warmly at the start of the preface. That short preface, which the classicists John Scarborough and Vivian Nutton translated and analysed in 1982, is the only place where the author speaks about himself and his reasons for writing. Almost everything known about his method, and much of what is guessed about his life, comes from it. Modern readers can approach the full text through several English translations, including the seventeenth-century version by John Goodyer, a 2005 translation by L. Y. Beck and Osbaldeston’s edition built on Goodyer’s wording; Scarborough reviewed the state of these modern versions in 2007.

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2. Five Books at a Glance

De Materia Medica is divided into five books, which in an ancient scroll culture meant five separate rolls. The division is not botanical in the modern sense. Each book gathers materials that a working physician would think of together, and the order runs roughly from fragrant, valuable substances to everyday foods, then to roots and herbs, then to the powerful and dangerous plants, and finally to wines and minerals. Following the summaries given by Osbaldeston and by standard reference works, the contents run as follows.

Read as a whole, the arrangement shows a practical mind at work. A reader looking for the strong-acting plants of Book IV would find them together, near similar dangers; a reader looking for medicinal foods would find them together in Book II. How Dioscorides decided which plants belonged next to which is one of the most debated questions about the book, and it is taken up in section 5 below.

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3. Six Hundred Plants, a Thousand Medicines

The figure most often quoted is that De Materia Medica describes about 600 plants, together with a smaller number of animal and mineral materials, and around 1,000 medicines prepared from them. Osbaldeston’s introduction puts it as “some one thousand remedies using approximately six hundred plants and plant products”, and adds that about seventy remedies are drawn from animal products. These are round numbers, and the exact total depends on how one counts a plant that yields several drugs (a root, a juice, a seed) or a drug that is made from several plants.

A modern team set out to count properly. In 2016 Staub, Casu and Leonti, working from the 1568 edition of the text with commentary by the Renaissance physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli, built a database of every herbal drug and every use the book assigns to it. They counted 5,314 unique therapeutic uses spread across 536 plant taxa and 924 distinct herbal drugs. Their survey also found patterns that are not obvious from a casual read: underground parts — roots, rhizomes and bulbs — were relied on heavily as drugs; the seeds of the pea family (Fabaceae) were used largely for skin complaints; and seeds of the carrot family (Apiaceae) were often listed as antidotes. The title of their paper, “Back to the roots”, is a play on that finding.

The scale matters for understanding why the book lasted. A physician of the first century, or of the fifteenth, who owned a copy had in one place a reference to most of the medicinal plants of the eastern Mediterranean, with a far wider range of uses than any single practitioner could have built up alone. Specialist readers later mined it for particular subjects: the historians Touwaide, De Santo and their colleagues, for example, identified about 200 plants in it that were used for diseases of the kidneys and urinary tract.

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4. The Preface: Experience over Gossip

Ancient authors often began a technical book by reviewing their predecessors, and Dioscorides did the same — but sharply. In the preface, addressed “Dearest Areius”, he acknowledges that many writers before him had written on medicines, and then explains why he thought their work fell short. Some, he says, had described plants they had never seen. His example is a writer called Niger, who had described aloe as “a mineral found in Judea”. Aloe, as anyone who had handled it knew, comes from a plant. Niger and writers like him, in Osbaldeston’s translation, had taken their information “from erroneous gossip, not from personal experience”.

Not every predecessor was dismissed. Dioscorides singles out Crateuas, called “the rhizotomist” (literally the root-cutter, a plant gatherer and herbalist), and Andreas the physician as better informed than most. Against the book-learning of the others he sets his own method, and the passage is the heart of the preface. In Osbaldeston’s translation he writes:

“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)”.

And, explaining how he gathered his material:

“since I know many plants personally, and others from previous writings that are generally approved of — and patiently inquiring (by questioning the local inhabitants) about each type of plant, I will attempt a different classification”.

Three sources of knowledge are named here: plants he had seen himself, earlier writings that had stood the test of agreement, and careful questioning of the people who lived where the plants grew. The emphasis on seeing for oneself is why the preface is often read as an early statement of an empirical attitude in medicine — knowledge tested against experience rather than taken on authority. The same attitude appears inside the entries, where he more than once reports a claim made by an earlier writer and then rejects it as, in the translation, “false, disproved by experience”. The life behind the phrase “I was a soldier” is discussed on the Life and Times page.

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5. Why Not Alphabetical? Drug Affinities

The “different classification” that Dioscorides promised was a deliberate break with the easiest way to organise a reference book. Many earlier writers on drugs had listed their materials alphabetically. Dioscorides objected that this approach scatters things that belong together. In Osbaldeston’s translation, the other writers “establish an alphabetical system in their discussions and thus separate types and activities of materials that are similar, so that they become harder to remember.” His complaint is both practical and intellectual: an alphabetical list puts unrelated plants side by side, and it hides the relationships between drugs that a physician most needs to understand.

What, then, did he put in place of the alphabet? On the surface, the five books group materials in loose families — aromatics, foods, roots, herbs, wines, minerals. Within those groups, though, the order of individual entries has long puzzled readers, because plants that look nothing alike sometimes sit next to each other while close botanical relatives are far apart.

The historian of medicine John M. Riddle offered the best-known explanation in his 1985 book Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine. Riddle argued that the arrangement follows what he called “drug affinities”: Dioscorides grouped substances by the effect they had on the body rather than by botanical likeness, and these groupings, in Riddle’s view, were discovered through clinical observation of how patients responded. On this reading, the book is organised as a physician would think, by what a drug does, rather than as a botanist would, by what a plant looks like. The historian Reeds reviewed Riddle’s argument at length in the journal Isis in 1987 under the title “Dioscorides unriddled”. The drug-affinity system is Riddle’s interpretation, not something Dioscorides spelled out, and it remains a scholarly reading of the evidence rather than a settled fact.

The irony of the story is that later copyists often undid the author’s choice. The famous illustrated manuscript made in Constantinople in about 512 AD, the Vienna Dioscorides, rearranges the plants alphabetically — exactly the order Dioscorides had rejected — because a reader looking up a single plant by name found that easier. That manuscript has its own page in this wing, The Vienna Dioscorides and 1,500 Years of Legacy.

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6. Anatomy of an Entry

Most entries in De Materia Medica follow a recognisable pattern, which is one reason the book worked so well as a reference. Not every entry contains every part, but a full entry moves through roughly these steps:

  1. Names. The plant’s main Greek name, often followed by other names it went by — including names in other languages.
  2. Description. What the plant looks like: its stalk, leaves, flowers, fruit and root, written so that a reader could recognise it in the field.
  3. Habitat. Where it grows, and sometimes which region produced the best quality.
  4. Properties and actions. What the material does to the body, in the medical language of the time — warming, cooling, astringent, softening, purging.
  5. Preparations and uses. How the material was made into a medicine (juice, decoction, oil, plaster, wine) and the conditions it was used for.
  6. Adulteration. How the drug was faked in the market, and how to tell the genuine article from the fake.
  7. Cautions. Harms, including the statement, for the strongest plants, that too much kills.

A worked example: the opium poppy

The entry on the opium poppy (Greek mekon, the plant now called Papaver somniferum, Book IV, entry 65 in Osbaldeston’s numbering) shows the pattern clearly. Dioscorides sets out the plant’s actions in a single line: the dried juice, in Osbaldeston’s translation, is “a pain-easer, a sleep-causer, and a digester, helping coughs and abdominal cavity afflictions.” He then records the danger in the same breath: “Taken as a drink too often it hurts (making men lethargic) and it kills.” The entry goes on to describe, briefly, how the juice was collected from the seed head, and it distinguishes true opium from a weaker product called meconium, made by pressing the whole plant. It includes a test for counterfeits (see section 7), and it reports and rejects claims about the poppy made by three earlier writers — Diagoras, Andreas and Mnesidemus — as disproved by experience. Recognition, action, harm, preparation, fraud and the critique of authorities all sit in one entry. The quantities that appear in entries like this one belong to ancient practice and are reported here only as history; the poppy’s long road to morphine is followed on the Plants and Remedies page.

A second example: aloe

The entry on aloe (Book III, entry 25) follows the same shape for a gentler material. Dioscorides gives the places where the plant grows abundantly — India, and also Arabia, Asia and the island of Andros — and describes the plant itself. He then lists its uses: the leaf, pounded, was used to close cuts and wounds; the juice, in the translation, “loosens the intestines”; and “sprinkled on dry it heals wounds”. The entry closes with advice on choosing pure aloe juice and recognising one that has been bulked out with gum. Set beside the preface, the entry carries a quiet point: the material that Niger had called a mineral is here described growing in the ground. The later history of aloe as a medicine, from antiquity onward, was surveyed by the medical historian Haller in 1990.

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7. Spotting Counterfeits: Adulteration Tests

Drug fraud is ancient. Expensive materials such as opium, aloe, frankincense and the aromatic resins were traded over long distances, passed through many hands and were easy to stretch with something cheaper. Dioscorides treated the detection of fakes as part of the knowledge a physician needed, and many of his entries include a short section on how a drug was adulterated and how the fraud could be caught. This is one of the most practical, and most modern-sounding, features of the book.

His tests rely on the senses and on simple handling. For aloe, he writes, in Osbaldeston’s translation, that aloe is “counterfeit … with gum — which is noticed by the taste, the bitterness, the strength of the smell”: genuine aloe is intensely bitter, and a sample diluted with gum betrays itself by tasting and smelling weaker. For opium, he names three common adulterants — the juice of the horned poppy (glaucium), gum, and the juice of wild lettuce — and explains that each could be detected. Osbaldeston’s introduction lists further examples of the same kind: valerian adulterated with butcher’s broom, and frankincense mixed with pine resin and gum.

These checks are crude by modern standards, which identify a drug by its chemistry rather than by taste and smell. The underlying idea, however, is the same one that runs through every modern pharmacopoeia: a medicine is only as good as the identity and purity of the material it is made from. Pharmacognosy, the modern science of natural medicines, still begins with exactly this question — is this sample what it claims to be? — and Dioscorides’ adulteration tests are an early written form of it.

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8. Gathering and Storing Herbs

The preface does more than criticise predecessors. It also sets out general rules about how the quality of a plant medicine depends on when and where the plant is gathered and how it is kept — principles that apply across the whole book. Paraphrasing Osbaldeston’s translation, they come to these points:

These rules show that Dioscorides understood a fact that modern herbal science measures with chemistry: the amount of active compound in a plant varies with season, climate, soil and age of the stored material. The first-century physician had no way to measure that variation directly, but he recorded its effects and built his advice on gathering around them. The point about watching a plant through its whole life cycle is also one of the clearest statements of his preference for first-hand observation.

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9. Minerals, Animals and Foreign Names

Minerals and metals

Although De Materia Medica is remembered as an herbal, its last book turns to metallic and mineral substances. Their inclusion reflects the full range of ancient pharmacy, which drew on everything in the natural world; the mineral side of medicine was later pushed much further by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century.

Medicines from animals

Book II opens with medicines taken from animals, and Osbaldeston counts about seventy animal-product remedies in all. They range from dairy foods to materials that a modern reader finds strange, drawn from various creatures and their parts. Many of these entries belong to the ancient world’s shared medical lore rather than to observation, and they are part of what section 10 describes.

Names in other languages

One of the book’s most unusual features is its record of plant names in other languages. Many entries list, after the Greek name, what the plant was called by Romans, Egyptians, Dacians (people of the region of present-day Romania) and others. Some of these names survive nowhere else, which makes De Materia Medica a source for historians of language as well as of medicine. For Dioscorides, the lists served a practical purpose: a traveller or a physician dealing with traders from different regions needed to know that several names could point to the same plant, and the habit of questioning local people that he describes in the preface is visible in them.

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10. Observation and Superstition Side by Side

Dioscorides’ reputation as an observer is earned, but the book is a work of its time, and it also records beliefs that no modern reader would accept. Osbaldeston gives examples: a plant of the Echium kind described as an amulet against snakes, and Polemonia worn against the stings of scorpions. Uses of this kind sit in the same pages as careful descriptions of plants and sharp tests for fake drugs.

The medical historian M. J. Eadie examined one corner of the book closely in 2004: the materials Dioscorides listed for epilepsy. Eadie found a mixture of botanical, animal and mineral remedies, many of them, in his words, “often with no clear underlying rationale”. He also traced how long some of them lasted. The so-called swallow stones were still being mentioned in the writings of the English physician Thomas Willis as late as 1675, more than 1,600 years after Dioscorides. The weight of the book’s authority carried its weak entries forward along with its strong ones.

Modern researchers have also tried to measure the strong ones. Yarnell and Touwaide checked the 105 plants that Dioscorides described as promoting urine flow against later laboratory and clinical research. They found that 56 plant genera — 53.3 percent of the total — had been confirmed as diuretic in animal or human studies, 5 had been shown not to be, 6 gave mixed results and 38 had never been tested; of the genera that had been studied, 83.6 percent were confirmed. Studies of folk medicine show the same long reach in a different way: Leonti and colleagues, comparing plant use in Sardinia and Sicily, described the island folk pharmacopoeias as “shallow stereotypes of the different editions of De Materia Medica”. Touwaide and his co-authors summed up the book’s place in the history of drugs as a deep influence on the centuries that followed, “up to the birth of modern pharmacochemistry”.

The fair verdict is the one the evidence supports: De Materia Medica holds real, testable observation, and alongside it the amulets and folk remedies of the ancient Mediterranean. What set it apart was not that it was free of error, but that its author stated, in the preface, a standard — personal experience over gossip — by which later readers could judge his own entries. How the book travelled and was judged over the next 1,500 years is the subject of The Vienna Dioscorides and 1,500 Years of Legacy.

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Key Research Papers

  1. 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
  2. Reeds K. Dioscorides unriddled. "Dioscorides on pharmacy and medicine". By John M. Riddle. Essay review. Isis. 1987;78(291):85-8. PubMed PMID: 3294735
  3. 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
  4. Eadie MJ. The antiepileptic Materia Medica of Pediacus Dioscorides. J Clin Neurosci. 2004;11(7):697-701. PubMed PMID: 15337127
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. Haller JS Jr. A drug for all seasons. Medical and pharmacological history of aloe. Bull N Y Acad Med. 1990;66(6):647-59. PubMed PMID: 2282445
  10. Scarborough J. Dioscorides of Anazarbus for moderns--an essay review. Pharm Hist. 2007;49(2):76-80. PubMed PMID: 18351270
  11. Janick J, Stolarczyk J. Ancient Greek Illustrated Dioscoridean Herbals: Origins and Impact of the Juliana Anicia Codex and the Codex Neopolitanus. Not Bot Horti Agrobot Cluj-Napoca. 2012;40(1):9. DOI: 10.15835/nbha4017767

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