Dioscorides’ travels as a surgeon with the armies of the Roman emperor Nero provided him an opportunity to study the features, distribution, & medicinal properties of many plants & minerals.
Excellent descriptions of nearly 600 plants, including cannabis, colchicum, water hemlock, & peppermint, are contained in De materia medica. Written in five books around the year 77, this work deals with approximately 944 simple drugs.
This classical work, translated many times, offers plenty of data on the medicinal plants constituting the basic materia medica until the late Middle Ages & the Renaissance.
Of the total of 944 drugs described, 657 are of plant origin, with descriptions of the outward appearance, locality, mode of collection, making of the medicinal preparations, & their therapeutic effect. In addition to the plant description, the names in other languages coupled with the localities where they occur or are grown are provided.
The plants having mild effect are dominant, but there are also references to those containing alkaloid or other matter with strong effect (fragrant hellebore, false hellebore, poppy, buttercup, jimson weed, henbane, deadly nightshade).
Dioscorides’ most appreciated domestic plants are as follows: willow, camomile, garlic, onion, marsh mallow, ivy, nettle, sage, common centaury, coriander, parsley, sea onion, & false hellebore).
Dioscorides differentiated between a number of species from the genus Mentha, which were grown & used to relieve headache & stomach ache.
The bulbs of sea onion & parsley were utilized as diuretics, oak bark was used for gynaecological purposes, while white willow was used as an antipyretic. As maintained by Dioscorides, Scillae bulbus was also applied as an expectorant, cardiac stimulant, & antihydrotic.
Dioscorides even pointed to the possibility of forgery of drugs, both the domestic ones such as opium forged by a yellow poppy (Glaucium flavum) milk sap & poppy, & the more expensive oriental drugs, transported by the Arab merchants from the Far East, such as iris, calamus, caradmomum, incense, etc.
