Materia Medica Lite Download
Risa Abboud
Materia medica (lit.: '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). The term derives from the title of a work by the Ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the 1st century AD, De materia medica, 'On medical material' (Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς, Peri hylēs iatrikēs, in Greek).
The term materia medica was used from the period of the Roman Empire until the 20th century, but has now been generally replaced in medical education contexts by the term pharmacology. The term survives in the title of the British Medical Journal's "Materia Non Medica" column.
The earliest known writing about medicine was a 110-page Egyptian papyrus. It was supposedly written by the god Thoth in about 16 BC. The Ebers papyrus is an ancient recipe book dated to approximately 1552 BC. It contains a mixture of magic and medicine with invocations to banish disease and a catalogue of useful plants, minerals, magic amulets and spells.[1] The most famous Egyptian physician was Imhotep, who lived in Memphis around 2500 B.C. 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.[2]
The earliest Chinese manual of materia medica, the Shennong Bencao Jing (Shennong Emperor's Classic of Materia Medica), was compiled in the 1st century AD during the Han dynasty, attributed to the mythical Shennong. It lists some 365 medicines, of which 252 are herbs. Earlier literature included lists of prescriptions for specific ailments, exemplified by the Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments found in the Mawangdui tomb, which was sealed in 168 BC. Succeeding generations augmented the Shennong Bencao Jing, as in the Yaoxing Lun (Treatise on the Nature of Medicinal Herbs), a 7th-century Tang dynasty treatise on herbal medicine.
Galen was a philosopher, physician, pharmacist and prolific medical writer. He compiled an extensive record of the medical knowledge of his day and added his own observations. He wrote on the structure of organs, but not their uses; the pulse and its association with respiration; the arteries and the movement of blood; and the uses of theriacs. "In treatises such as On Theriac to Piso, On Theriac to Pamphilius, and On Antidotes, Galen identified theriac as a sixty-four-ingredient compound, able to cure any ill known".[4] His work was rediscovered in the 15th century and became the authority on medicine and healing for the next two centuries. His medicine was based on the regulation of the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) and their properties (wet, dry, hot, and cold).[5]
The Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, of Anazarbus in Asia Minor, wrote a five-volume treatise concerning medical matters, entitled Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς in Greek or De materia medica in Latin. This famous commentary covered about 600 plants along with therapeutically useful animal and mineral products. It documented the effects of drugs made from these substances on patients. De materia medica was the first extensive pharmacopeia, including about a thousand natural product drugs (mostly plant-based), 4,740 medicinal usages for drugs, and 360 medical properties (such as antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, stimulant). The book was heavily translated, and portrayed some of the emblematic actions of physicians and herbalists. One such page is Physician Preparing an Elixir.
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. In several of these versions, the annotations and comments exceed the Dioscoridean text and have much new botany. Printers were not merely printing the authentic materia medica, but hiring experts on the medical and botanical field for criticism, commentaries, that would raise the stature of the printers and the work.[3]
Laguna explored[27] 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. He also includes some animal and mineral products but only those related to simple medicines, that is, animal and mineral products that are medicine or are parts of a medical compound.[28] This was not an illustrated work. In 1555 he re-edited this work with woodcuts.[27]It was reprinted twenty-two times by the end of the 18th century; Laguna wrote very well, with explanations and practical commentaries.[28] He refers to anecdotes, adds commentaries on the plants, provides their synonyms in different languages, and explains their uses in the 16th century. These qualities and the number of woodcuts made this work very popular and appreciated in medicine far beyond the 16th century. He had problems with Mattioli for using some of his commentaries without mentioning him.[28]
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.[37]
Ethnopharmacological relevance: Medicinal diets have a history of more than 2000 years. Locally referred to as yaoshan (Chinese: ), a medicinal diet is understood in China as a dietary product that combines herbs and food with the purpose of preventing and treating diseases or improving health under the guidance of traditional Chinese medicine theory. Medicinal diets are used in Chinese people's daily life and in specialized restaurants. Hundreds of Chinese materia medica (CMM) are used in medicinal diets; however, a comprehensive evaluation of medicinal diets is lacking.
Your teachers at the Herbal Academy have created this Herbal Materia Medica Course to guide you through the process of studying, researching, and observing plants in order to create an herbal materia medica. Designed for herbalists in the making, seasoned herbalists, and those of you not yet sure if this is the right path for you, this program will walk you through the process of studying one herb at a time, teaching you how to create (or add to) your materia medica.
In the introduction, you will learn the benefits of studying one herb at a time and choose the herb (or herbs) to include in your materia medica as you work through the course. You will begin researching the first categories for your materia medica pages.
In this lesson, we will explore several safety considerations in more depth and examine the resources that can help you research these important topics so you can add this information to your materia medica.
One of the most influential medical treatises handed down to Muslims was De Materia Medica, by a first-century B.C. Greek physician in Cilicia (southern Anatolia). The left page concerns making medicine from honey and water, prescribed to cure weakness and loss of appetite. A doctor holds a gold cup while stirring the boiling honey and water in a cauldron as he prepares to scoop it up for the seated patient. The architectural setting suggests that the drugs are being produced in a pharmacy like those attached to hospitals in the Seljuq lands. In the illustration on the right, a doctor and his assistant or patient stand on either side of a sieve through which grapes are pressed and then combined with brine and an onion-like herb to produce a medicine to cure digestive disorders.
Jesuit father José de Acosta became familiar with the New World after living for more than 20 years in Peru and traveling extensively throughout the Andes and Mexico. His Natural and Moral History of the Indies was a major bestseller during the seventeenth century. Although this was not a medical book, it contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about the pharmacological properties of many plants from South America. Acosta was one of the first authors to describe what we know today as altitude sickness, explaining it in clearly secular terms. His defense of the heuristic value of direct observation and first hand experiences had a tremendous impact on scholars like Francis Bacon. Today, Acosta is considered a pioneer in the fields of biogeography, anthropology, and cosmography. In many ways, his work opened the door for novel forms of knowledge systematization, making a decisive contribution to the birth of scientific imperialism.
Although lavishly illustrated botanical and medical books were very important in the transatlantic circulation of erudite knowledge, the fact that they were so expensive to produce made them inaccessible to many common practitioners. Even cheaper versions like the abridged translations of the work of Hernández, were still hard to find outside the main cities. It was through very basic publications, like this humble broadside printed in Guatemala, that botanical information became readily available to the literate masses. This case in particular is very interesting, because printer Cristobal de Hincapié Meléndez was also an apothecary and a surgeon. So, on the front of the broadside he reprinted an overview of the properties of a local emetic known as habilla, originally issued in Mexico in 1737. On the back, shown here, Hincapié Meléndez added a note regarding the differences between the habilla from Central America and the South American emetic known as ipecacuanha. As we can see, even modest publications such as this served to keep medical and botanical information up to date, contributing to the production of new knowledge as well as to the dissemination of the old. Given the ephemeral nature of these publications, a systematic reconstruction of their role is very difficult. For example, no other copy of this broadside is known to exist.
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