Medicinally Used Plants in “De Materia Medica”

Just how important is a single book? In the case of the one featured here, _De materia medica_, the answer is 1500 years: that’s how long this text dominated the genre of applied medical textbooks. The most important description of plants and their uses for over a millennia and a half, it wasn’t rediscovered in the Italian Renaissance– it had never gone out of circulation.

Composed around 65 CE by the Greek physician Dioscurides of Anazarbos, a soldier in the Ancient Roman army, _De materia medica_ discusses the physical qualities and properties of about 600 plants, focusing on the ways they might be used medicinally. You can see naturally rendered illustrations for wild blackberry on the first image, and coral on the third.

Such descriptions of plants were so important they formed a whole genre: herbals. Folks from every walk of life would have had need for the sort of knowledge in these books, as plant identification was critical for their use as painkillers (Dioscurides writes extensively about opium, for instance) to digestives, from anti-parisiticals to various diseases. _De materia medica_ was widely circulated and translated out of the original Greek into Latin and Arabic. The important place that Dioscurides held as a physician of renown can be seen in the fourth photo, which shows a sixth-century illumination of Heuresis, the personification of discovery, holding up a mandrake to Dioscurides as the seated physician reaches out towards the plant.

But this work was important in another way, in its particular manifestation in a single manuscript from the 500s, called the “Vienna Dioscurides.” It was written for dedicatiin to a woman named Anicia Juliana in gratitude for her funding of a church in the suburbs of Constantinople during the Byzantine Empire — the final image features Anicia seated, receiving the book from a figure labeled “Gratitude for the Arts”. This book was kept at the imperial hospital in Constantinople for centuries after – records of its use by a monk in the 1300s exist, as does an account that the hospital had it rebound in 1406.