Materia medica, Latin for “medical material,” is the old name for the study of substances used as medicines. It covered where they came from, whether plants, animals or minerals, how they were prepared, and what they did.
Where the name comes from
The name comes from De materia medica (“On Medical Material”), a herbal written in Greek in the 1st century CE by Dioscorides, a physician who traveled with the Roman army. Its 5 books describe about 600 plants and around 1,000 medicines, and doctors relied on it for more than 1,500 years. He also described mandrake root boiled in wine, given before surgery to dull the pain. The oldest surviving illustrated copy, the Vienna Dioscorides, was made in Constantinople around 512. One of its first paintings shows a woman labeled Heuresis, Greek for “discovery,” handing Dioscorides a mandrake root.
From materia medica to pharmacology
From the 1800s, the newer science of pharmacology took its place, but the old name lasted in some university titles. Glasgow University kept a Regius Chair of Materia Medica, founded in 1831, until 1989. A materia medica describes medicines and their uses, while a pharmacopoeia sets the official standards for making them.
Materia medica in our collection
Hermann Köhler, the man credited with Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, wrote a guide to materia medica for doctors and students in the 1870s. The book’s plant texts read like a materia medica, covering a plant’s medicinal parts, what they contain and how they were used. The Mandrake in our botanical art collection, from Rembert Dodoens’s 1583 herbal, shows the same plant.
