De materia medica was circulated as illustrated manuscripts, copied by hand, in Greek, Latin, and Arabic throughout the medieval period.

It served as the foundation for herbals in these languages by figures such as Leonhart Fuchs, Valerius Cordus, Lobelius, Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, John Gerard, and William Turner.

[3][4] In contrast to many classical authors, De materia medica was not "rediscovered" in the Renaissance, because it never left circulation; indeed, Dioscorides' text eclipsed the Hippocratic Corpus.

The most famous is the lavishly illustrated Vienna Dioscurides (the Juliana Anicia Codex), written in the original Greek in Byzantine Constantinople in 512/513 AD; its illustrations are sufficiently accurate to permit identification, something not possible with later medieval drawings of plants; some of them may be copied from a lost volume owned by Juliana Anicia's great-grandfather, Theodosius II, in the early 5th century.

[11] De materia medica is the prime historical source of information about the medicines used by the Greeks, Romans, and other cultures of antiquity.

Its effects are summarized, accompanied by a caution:[16] A little of it (taken with as much as a grain of ervum) is a pain-easer, a sleep-causer, and a digester, helping coughs and abdominal cavity afflictions.

He ends with a description of how the liquid is gathered from poppy plants, and lists names used for it: chamaesyce, mecon rhoeas, oxytonon; papaver to the Romans, and wanti to the Egyptians.

[16] As late as in the Tudor and Stuart periods in Britain, herbals often still classified plants in the same way as Dioscorides and other classical authors, not by their structure or apparent relatedness but by how they smelt and tasted, whether they were edible, and what medicinal uses they had.

[17] Only when European botanists like Matthias de l'Obel, Andrea Cesalpino and Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (Bachmann) had done their best to match plants they knew to those listed in Dioscorides did they go further and create new classification systems based on similarity of parts, whether leaves, fruits, or flowers.

They include what are probably cardamom, nard, valerian, cassia or senna, cinnamon, balm of Gilead, hops, mastic, turpentine, pine resin, bitumen, heather, quince, apple, peach, apricot, lemon, pear, medlar, plum and many others.

[24] Writing in The Great Naturalists, the historian of science David Sutton describes De materia medica as "one of the most enduring works of natural history ever written"[25] and that "it formed the basis for Western knowledge of medicines for the next 1,500 years.

"[25] The historian of science Marie Boas writes that herbalists depended entirely on Dioscorides and Theophrastus until the 16th century, when they finally realized they could work on their own.

[7] She notes also that herbals by different authors, such as Leonhart Fuchs, Valerius Cordus, Lobelius, Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, John Gerard and William Turner, were dominated by Dioscorides, his influence only gradually weakening as the 16th-century herbalists "learned to add and substitute their own observations".

[29] Further, his approach matched the Renaissance liking for detailed description, unlike the philosophical search for essential nature (as in Theophrastus's Historia Plantarum).

"[31] To illustrate this, she states that "Dioscorides describes many valuable drugs including aconite, aloes, bitter apple, colchicum, henbane, and squill".

Many other substances that Dioscorides describes remain in modern pharmacopoeias as "minor drugs, diluents, flavouring agents, and emollients ... [such as] ammoniacum, anise, cardamoms, catechu, cinnamon, colocynth, coriander, crocus, dill, fennel, galbanum, gentian, hemlock, hyoscyamus, lavender, linseed, mastic, male fern, marjoram, marshmallow, mezereon, mustard, myrrh, orris (iris), oak galls, olive oil, pennyroyal, pepper, peppermint, poppy, psyllium, rhubarb, rosemary, rue, saffron, sesame, squirting cucumber (elaterium), starch, stavesacre (delphinium), storax, stramonium, sugar, terebinth, thyme, white hellebore, white horehound, and couch grass—the last still used as a demulcent diuretic.

Dioscorides lists drugs for women to cause abortion and to treat urinary tract infection; palliatives for toothache, such as colocynth, and others for intestinal pains; and treatments for skin and eye diseases.

[33]Along with his fellow physicians of Ancient Rome, Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Galen, Hippocrates and Soranus of Ephesus, Dioscorides had a major and long-lasting effect on Arabic medicine as well as medical practice across Europe.