Dioscorides on dental and oral treatments (original) (raw)
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Studies On De Materia Medica Of Dioscorides In The Islamic Era
2013
Pedanius Dioscorides was a Roman army surgeon in the first century A.D. His great work called De Materia Medica is widely accepted as the foremost pharmaceutical source of antiquity. Dioscorides was the originator of materia medica (pharmacology), and he took advantage of his extensive travels to study plants. Dioscorides was considered a major authority on simple drugs for sixteen centuries. De Materia Medica served as a corner stone for both western and eastern pharmaceutical and herbal writing, and was translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Persian, as well as Latin. The particular characteristic of medical therapy in the Medieval Period was the extensive employment of drugs of all kinds. For this reason, Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica was not only studied closely, but it also became a text book that Turk-Islamic scientists frequently referred to in their writings.
The historical significance of Dioscorides' "De Materia Medica"
De Materia Medica (On Medical Material) is an encyclopedia of herbs and medicines that can be obtained from plants. The work spans five volumes, and describes over 600 plants, that make nearly 1000 medicinal tinctures, along with some animals and uses for them. He also desrcibed some minerals. The book was written, from 50 to 70 AD by Pediano Dioskourides, aka Pedanius Dioscorides, who lived from about 40AD to 90AD. He was born in what would be today, Turkey.
The Philosophical Method of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica
HOPOS (History of Philosophy of Science), 2023
It is commonly thought that Dioscorides’ view on medicine is purely pragmatic, focusing entirely on the effectiveness of medicines, and derived from trial and error. One reason for this interpretation is that Dioscorides himself writes very little about his theory of medicine. However, this paper argues that he would have arranged De Materia Medica in a way that would have been useful only to a skilled practitioner. This would imply that Dioscorides has a medical theory, since the arrangement of the content could not have followed a trial and error approach. It is only in the sense of having a theory that he is able to claim that his text is more “complete” than others. This paper provides an historical overview of the text from its genesis, to its reception, and ultimately to its falling out of use. It concludes with a series of hypotheses of the correspondence between theory and arrangement of the treatise with the aim of narrowing scholarly conjectures about both. In the final analysis, we argue that an arrangement by family resemblance most closely corresponds to the theory that animates Dioscorides' text.
Dioscoride dans les Simples de Galien
Revue des Études Grecques, 2022
“Dioscorides in Galen’s Simples”. In the 2nd century CE, despite the large number of works available on materia medica, Galen decided to compose the treatise On Simple Drugs. While most of these works are now lost, Diosco- rides’ De materia medica has survived the great loss of classical texts maybe because of its high quality and complementarity with the Simples. In the first part of this study, we will collect all the passages from the Simples which explicitly refer to Dioscorides and we will study the posture that Galen adopts towards his great predecessor. How does he justify the composition of the umpteenth pharma- cological treatise and by what strategies does he try to establish himself as the new authority in pharmacology? In the second part, we will analyze how and to what extent Galen reproduces the contents of the De materia medica in his treatise on simple drugs.
Veterinary Usage Of Drugs In De Materia Medica Of Dioscorides
De Materia Medica of Dioscorides includes the medicinal properties of over one thousand natural medicinal substances; most of these are botanical in origin, but drugs of animal and mineral origin were also enclosed. Thus it is necessary to consider this monumental work in every aspects. One of them is veterinary usage of drugs in De Materia Medica. The first English version of De Materia Medica was translated by John Goodyer in 1655 and was prepared by Robert Gunther in 1968. A group of scientist moderated by Tess Anne Osbaldeston revised Gunter’s English version in 2000. In this paper, this revised version was used widely. The translations and expressions of revised version was controlled and compared with the Latin and Greek version printed in 1549. Besides the modern research studies were reached to verify the properties and usage of the herbs in veterinary medicine that Dioscorides mentioned. As a result there are seven drugs related to veterinary usage in it such as mastic tree, cedar, olive oil sediment, cuttlefish, Egyptian lupin, Hart’s tongue fern (or Horse tongue), and Wild clematis. Dioscorides suggested external usage for all of them for animal diseases such as parasitic skin diseases, scabs, ulcers, dislocations, and white spots on the cornea. He does not give any dosages of these drugs but he gives application and preparing methods of them. This study shows us that the drugs Dioscorides mentiones for veterinary usage could be effective for external animal diseases.
Giorgio Valla’s Dioscorides (Mutin. A.P.5.17, GR. 115)
Medicina nei secoli, 2024
Giorgio Valla owned a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, a reference work in the field of pharmacology for simple medicines. Today kept at the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena with the shelf mark α.P.5.17, it is partly autograph and bears a subscription dated 1487. Representative of the earliest studies on the Greek text of Discorides’ in Humanist Italy, this manuscript is of particular interest in many respects, not least because of the conditions under which it was produced and the achievements it led to. This article will therefore consider both the production and usage contexts of the manuscript, which place Giorgio Valla at the centre of a network of humanists interested in compiling and interpreting Dioscorides’ text (Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Nicolò Leoniceno and Alessandro Bondino), as well as the concrete evidence of how Valla could read and use the treatise.
Pharmacology in byzantine dental practice
2010
The study of the Byzantine medical texts reveals a great number of references about dental drugs. This frequency indicates that problems of oral health were common and part of the epidemiology of those times. In the extended medical compilations, the authors offer a variety of preventive and healing advices on teeth, adding in parallel some elements of magic that co-exist with the apparently scientific therapeutic methods. As Byzantine surgery is famous for the achievements in almost every specialty, the maxilla-facial and oral surgery has certain successful results to show. The prevention is another section of interest for the medical texts, because the physicians estimate the presupposition of oral health for the general well-being of the human body and its physiological function.
De materia medica, 2000
EDITORIAL PREFACE Pedanius Dioscorides the Greek wrote this De Materia Medica approximately two thousand years ago. In 1655 John Goodyer made an English translation from a manuscript copy, and in 1933 Robert T Gunther edited this, Hafner Publishing Co, London & New York, printing it. This was probably not corrected against the Greek, and this version of Goodyer's Dioscorides makes no such attempt either. The purpose of this new edition is to offer a more accessible text to today’s readers, as the ‘english-ed’ copy by Goodyer is generously endowed with post-medieval terminology and is presently out of print. The reader may wish to refer to Greek, Latin, or other versions — including these lies beyond the scope of the present effort. I have not attempted to make the text uniform, and though I have included some sixteenth-century and Linnaean names, many do not indicate current usage. While it is not my intention to contribute to the controversy surrounding the true identities of the plants, minerals, and creatures in De Materia Medica, where available I have suggested possible plant names, with an indication of other plants using the same name today. I will appreciate any pertinent information that has been overlooked, and wish to acknowledge the errors that remain. Thus the proposed herbs provide some possibilities, and the reader is invited to place a personal interpretation upon the material. The illustrations suggest further options in some instances. Dioscorides’ treatise is not offered as a primary resource for medical treatment. Readers should in the first instance obtain medical advice from qualified, registered health professionals. Many treatments considered acceptable two thousand years ago are useless or harmful. This particularly applies to the abortifacients mentioned in the manuscript, most of which contain toxins considered dangerous in the required doses. With all this in mind, I believe the information in this document is still of interest and benefit to us, after all this time.