Materia medica

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. Nowadays we would call these drugs. In Latin, the term literally means "medical material/substance".

The term was used from the period of the Roman Empire until the twentieth century, but has now been generally replaced in medical education contexts by the term pharmacology.

Contents

[edit] History

One of the best-known early uses of the term was in the title of a work by the Greek physician Dioscorides in the first century AD, entitled de materia medica libri quinque (concerning medical matter in five volumes). This famous commentary covered about 500 plants plus a number of therapeutically useful animal and mineral products.

Later in the medieval Islamic world, Muslim botanists and Muslim physicians significantly expanded on this knowledge. For example, al-Dinawari described more than 637 plant drugs in the 9th century,[1] and Ibn al-Baitar described at least 1,400 different plants, foods and drugs (300 of which were his own original discoveries) in the 13th century.[2]

The experimental scientific method was introduced into the field in the 13th century by the Andalusian-Arab botanist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, the teacher of Ibn al-Baitar. Al-Nabati introduced empirical techniques in the testing, description and identification of numerous materia medica, and he separated unverified reports from those supported by actual tests and observations. This allowed the study of materia medica to evolve into the science of pharmacology.[3]

During the Middle Ages and the modern era, the body of knowledge termed materia medica was transformed by the methods and knowledge of medicinal chemistry into the modern scientific discipline of pharmacology.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Fahd, Toufic, “Botany and agriculture”, pp. 815 , in (Morelon & Rashed 1996, pp. 813-52)
  2. ^ Diane Boulanger (2002), "The Islamic Contribution to Science, Mathematics and Technology", OISE Papers, in STSE Education, Vol. 3.
  3. ^ Huff, Toby (2003), The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West, Cambridge University Press, p. 218, ISBN 0521529948 

[edit] References

[edit] External links