"Neither religious nor scientific motives could explain the incentive to create such an image; only a cultured lay audience [...] could have commissioned and then perused these delightful pages.

[5] The terse paragraphs of the treatise were freely translated into Latin in mid-13th century Palermo or Naples,[6] which continued an Italo-Norman tradition as one of the prime sites for peaceable intercultural contact between the Islamic and European worlds.

[2] "Magister Faragius" (Ferraguth) in Naples took responsibility for one translation into Latin, in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, MS Lat.

The Tacuinum was very popular in Western Europe in the Late Middle Ages; an indication of that popularity is the use of the word taccuino in modern Italian to mean "notebook".In addition to its importance for the study of medieval medicine, the Tacuinum is also of interest in the study of agriculture and cooking; for example, one of the earliest identifiable images of the carrot—a modern plant—is found in it.

[9] This edition was accompanied by a commentary volume by Alain Touwaide (Smithsonian), Eberhard König (Freie Universität Berlin) and Carlos Miranda García-Tejedor (Doctor in History).

One compilation of the Tacuinum Sanitatis that combines the text from all four of the existing manuscripts includes forty-eight different vegetables, fruits, and clothes.

[10] Although the exact taxonomic classification of each plant is uncertain due to differences between manuscripts and errors during translation, the remedies described in the Tacuinum Sanitatis can still be loosely identified.

These remedies include chestnut (castanee), hazelnut (avelane), rose (roxe), lily (lilia), violet (viole), sage (salvia), marjoram (maiorana), and dill (aneti).

The entries include not only the benefits from the item, but also the potential dangers from using the remedy, similar to a list of side effects from modern medicine.