De materia medica, and: Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (review)

For more than 1,500 years, the closest equivalent of today’s Physicians’ Desk Reference was the pharmacological treatise, De materia medica, “On medical materials.” Dioscorides, a Greek doctor from Roman Cilicia, composed it late in the first century ce after traveling through the eastern Mediterranean lands. Succinct entries for some 600 natural substances — mostly plants, but also animal and mineral products — provided the materials’ names, sources, appearance, medicinal properties, therapeutic uses, methods of preparation, and tests for adulteration. Dioscorides also recorded folk remedies and superstitions but usually distanced himself from them with the skeptical words, “they say that. . . .”

Almost as soon as it was written, De materia medica began to be excerpted, condensed, rearranged, and translated into Latin, Arabic, and European vernaculars. A medieval Latin version glossed by Peter of Abano made it into print in 1478, but was quickly supplanted by fresh editions, translations, and commentaries by humanist scholars (see John Riddle’s detailed survey in Catalogus translationem et commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, IV, 1980). The new availability of Dioscorides deeply influenced Renaissance medical education and spurred a more general interest in natural history. By 1600, De materia medica could be read in Greek, Latin, Italian, Castilian, German, French, Czech, and Dutch — but not in English.

Except for passages embedded in the herbals of William Turner, John Gerard, and John Parkinson, Dioscorides was not translated into English until the mid-seventeenth century. Then, in the midst of civil strife, John Goodyer, a learned and capable botanist, transcribed the Greek text and wrote his translation between the lines. Goodyer willed his manuscript (4,540 quarto pages!) to Magdalen College Library, where it sat until 1934, when Robert T. Gunther published it as The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides . . . Englished by John Goodyer A. D. 1655 (reprint, 1968).

Even for readers familiar with Greek, Latin, seventeenth-century English, and early modern medical terminology, every line of Goodyer’s version poses problems. So a translation of De materia medica by a classicist into clear modern English is very welcome. Lily Y. Beck has followed Max Wellmann’s authoritative critical edition of the Greek text (1906–14; 1958 reprint; full-text available on Google Books), consulted the 1901 German translation by Julius Berendes, and used Jacques André’s botanical identifications in Les noms des plantes dans la Rome antique (1985). Her notes provide cross-references and elucidate etymologies, place-names, and natural history. The volume includes very useful indexes of the natural products (by English common name, Greek name, and, for plants, scientific name) and medical conditions they were used to treat.

The potential readership for De materia medica today is larger than it has ever been, thanks to recent scholarly interest in early medicine and natural history and the enormous upsurge of general interest in alternative medicine. Beck’s translation reveals how strikingly dependent Western herbal medicine in the twenty-first century remains on this first-century treatise. Unfortunately, at this price and in this series for classical scholars, Beck’s translation and her promised commentary will not reach the very wide audience they deserve. For that, we need a book that combines the two and fixes the typesetting problems that mar this volume. Because Dioscorides is also a prime source of information about ancient crafts, cooking, and agriculture, such a volume should add indexes to people, places, subjects, individual ingredients, Greek names, and scientific names. It should include a map to show the remarkable scope of the ancient drug trade and coordinate the scientific and common names with the Integrated Taxonomic Information System/ Catalogue of Life database ( http://itis.gov ). And it should take advantage of Alain Touwaide’s research on...