Materia medica
: 'medical material/substance') is a Latin term from the history of pharmacy for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing (i.e., medications).
Imhotep's materia medica consisted of procedures for treating head and torso injuries, tending of wounds, and prevention and curing of infections, as well as advanced principles of hygiene.
In India, the Ayurveda is traditional medicine that emphasizes plant-based treatments, hygiene, and balance in the body's state of being.
Indian materia medica included knowledge of plants, where they grow in all season, methods for storage and shelf life of harvested materials.
It also included directions for making juice from vegetables, dried powders from herb, cold infusions and extracts.
[3] Theophrastus (390–280 BC) was a disciple of Aristotle and a philosopher of natural history, considered by historians as the Father of Botany.
He also was the first to describe parasitic infection, to use urine for diagnostic purposes and discouraged physicians from the practice of surgery because it was too base and manual.
[2] In medieval Europe, medicinal herbs and plants were cultivated in monastery and nunnery gardens beginning about the 8th century.
[2] In the Early and High Middle Ages Nestorian Christians were banished for their heretical views that they carried to Asia Minor.
In 948 the Byzantine Emperor Romanus II, son and co-regent of Constantine Porphyrogenitos, sent a beautifully illustrated Greek manuscript of De materia medica to the Spanish Khalif, Abd-Arrahman III.
[7][10][11] Matthaeus Silvaticus, Avicenna, Galen, Dioscorides, Platearius and Serapio inspired the appearance of three main works printed in Mainz: In 1484 the Herbarius, the following year the Gart der Gesundheit, and in 1491 the Ortus Sanitatis.
The most useful books of botany, pharmacy and medicine used by students and scholars were supplemented commentaries on Dioscorides, including the works of Fuchs, Anguillara, Mattioli, Maranta, Cesalpino, Dodoens, Fabius Columna, Gaspard and Johann Bauhin, and De Villanueva/Servetus.
[4] During the 16th century, the most representative among them were Ermolao Barbaro, Jean Ruel, Broyeurinus, Michel de Villeneuva, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Andres Laguna, Marcello Virgilio, Martin Mathee and Valerius Cordus.
[4][7] In 1789, William Cullen published his two volume A Treatise of the Materia Medica, which was highly valued by other medical practitioners throughout Europe.
[citation needed] The work of the Italian physician and humanist Ermolao Barbaro was published in 1516, 23 years after his death.
Poliziano wrote to Ermalao Barbaro, forwarding a manuscript of the 1st-century pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, asking him to send it back "annotated by that very learned hand of yours, thus lending the volume additional value and authority.
Michael Servetus, using the name "Michel de Villeneuve", who already had his first death sentence from the University of Paris, anonymously published a Dioscorides-De Materia Medica in 1543, printed by Jean & Francois Frellon in Lyon.
This work had six later editions, in 1546 and 1547 by Jean Frellon, who considered Michael de Villeneuve "his friend and brother", another in 1547 by Thibaut Payen, etc.
The scholar Gonzalez Echeverria demonstrated in the ISHM[21] with a graphological, historical and linguistic study that this task was carried out by Michel de Villeneuve.
It also demonstrated that this document was written by the same hand that wrote the famous[26] "Manuscript of Paris", a work also by Michel de Villeneuve, consisting of a draft for his Christianismo Restitutio.
The list of important characters that were admonished, rebuked, or pursued by the Inquisition contains Wieland, Anguillara, Gesner, Lusitanus and others.
[27] In 1554 the physician Andres Laguna published his Annotations on Dioscorides of Anazarbus[28] printed by Guillaume Rouillé in Lyons.
Laguna points out some of his teacher's erroneous translations, and adds many commentaries, which make up more than half of the total work.
Laguna explored[28] many Mediterranean areas and obtained results concerning many new herbs; he also added these prescriptions and commentaries to the recipes and teachings of Pedanius' Dioscorides.
[29] Laguna had problems with the Inquisition, just like Michel de Villeneuve, for both were jewish-converso,[30] a fact that could have made them limit their commentaries to avoid risks.
Nevertheless, he was the physician of Charles V and the Pope Julius III,[28] and that helped to establish his work as the last word in Materia Medica, and as the basis of Spanish botany.
[33] It contained the index of the Botanologicon, the outstanding work of his father Euricius, who developed a scientific classification of the plants.
This section consisted of a very refined explanation of Dioscorides' teachings with more specifics on the variety of plants[35] and habitats, and corrections of errors.
[7] The ancient phrase survives in modified form in the British Medical Journal's long-established "Materia Non Medica" column, the title indicating non-medical material that doctors wished to report from their travels and other experiences.
For example, in June 1977, the journal contained "Materia Non Medica" reports on an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery by a London physician, the making of matches by hand in an Indian village by a missionary general practitioner, and a cruise to Jamaica by a University of the West Indies lecturer in medicine.
