Pedanius Dioscorides

Roman physician and author

• Born: c. 40
• Birthplace: Anazarbus, Roman Cilicia (now in Turkey)
• Died: c. 90 c.e.
• Place of death: Unknown

Through wide travel and much observation, Dioscorides compiled, organized, and published the most comprehensive pharmacological text produced in the ancient world. The work remained a standard reference work for herbalists and physicians for some sixteen hundred years.

Early Life

Pedanius Dioscorides (di-uhs-KOHR-uh-deez) came from the city of Anazarbus, located along the banks of the Pyramus River in Roman Cilicia, in the far southeastern corner of Asia Minor. In his day, Anazarbus considered itself a worthy rival to its more famous neighbor Tarsus for preeminence in this province. Other than for Dioscorides, Anazarbus is most famous for its red stone buildings and for having produced the poet Oppian in the second century c.e.

Dioscorides probably received his early education and medical training in Tarsus, a city famous for its pharmacologists (experts in the preparation, administration, and effects of drugs). Scholars have inferred that Dioscorides was schooled in Tarsus, not only because of Tarsus’s reputation but also because Dioscorides dedicated his De materia medica (c. 78 c.e.; The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, 1934, best known as De materia medica) to the physician Arius of Tarsus, from whom he seems to have received his medical training. It is also worth noting that Galen, the most famous of all Greek medical writers, referred to Dioscorides as Dioscorides of Tarsus, rather than of Anazarbus, indicating that Dioscorides was closely associated with the medical traditions of Tarsus in the minds of later scholars.

It may also have been in Tarsus that Dioscorides acquired his Roman name, or nomen, Pedanius. Even after the Romans had made the entire Mediterranean area part of their vast empire, it remained common for Greeks to have only one name. However, it was also common for provincials who were granted Roman citizenship to recognize their Roman patrons by adopting their names. Most likely, Dioscorides took his name from a connection with a member of the gens, or family, of the Pedanii (one of whom, Pedanius Secundus, had served as governor in the neighboring Roman province of Asia in the 50’s).

There is some debate over whether—and in what capacity and for what duration—Dioscorides served in the Roman military. It is quite possible that Dioscorides did serve in the military; if he did, it would account for some of his wide travels and would probably have brought him into contact with people from distant parts of the Roman world. His military experience would not account for his genius, however, and his later work does not greatly reflect the most pressing concerns of a field surgeon: treating wounds. It will suffice to say that his military experience was not an obstacle to his later career.

Life’s Work

Virtually all that is known about Dioscorides comes from the single source of his lasting fame, his great book on the medical properties of plants and other natural agents, De materia medica, which he wrote in Greek. In this book, a pharmacological text that describes hundreds of plants—as well as animals and minerals—and their properties when employed as drugs, Dioscorides reveals himself to be high-minded and genuinely concerned with the physician’s essential task of healing. Although Dioscorides may have been associated with the empirical school of medicine, his writing shows no trace of the contentious spirit or rancor so prevalent elsewhere in the ancient medical corpus. He was, almost without question, a physician himself rather than, as has sometimes been suggested, a traveling drug dealer. Selling drugs was a highly lucrative profession during Dioscorides’ time, and quackery was a serious problem, as pharmacists and so-called root-cutters competed for business with physicians. There were no licensing boards to protect patients from malpractice or fraud in the ancient world, and the motto of the day was caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.” Dioscorides, by producing his encyclopedic reference book on pharmacy, did much to alleviate this problem.

Dioscorides’ system of classifying plants based on their pharmaceutical properties is an original one. He divided his study into five books, each concerned with a different broad group of medicinal agents. Within these books, he then discussed each plant, animal, or mineral in its own chapter. He methodically lists the plant’s name (including common variants or synonyms), presents a drawing of it, gives its habitat and a botanical description, and then discusses its properties as a drug. He not only discusses positive qualities of these drugs but also warns of dangerous side effects. He instructs his readers on how and when to harvest, prepare, and store each plant or compound. He hastens to add in most cases that he has traveled extensively through the eastern Mediterranean and as far afield as India, Arabia, North Africa, Spain, and Gaul to examine these plants personally.

Book 1 of De materia medica deals with aromatics, oils, salves, trees, and shrubs. Book 2 covers animals, their parts and products, cereals, pot herbs, and sharp herbs. Book 3 is devoted to roots, juices, herbs, and seeds, while book 4 continues with more roots and herbs. Finally, in book 5, Dioscorides deals with wines and minerals. Throughout his work, Dioscorides stresses the importance of observation. Plants are living organisms, and they have different properties in youth and decay, when flowering and in seed, and they are affected by both the changing weather of the seasons and the local environment. A physician cannot expect plants gathered at different stages of growth and in different seasons to have the same effect on patients. Naturally, he also stresses the importance of observing the action of these medicaments on each and every patient. The body of medical knowledge must constantly be updated.

Dioscorides is notable for two characteristics. One is simply his excellence. Because he was a gifted empirical observer, his work was particularly valuable. Beyond that, he was moving toward a systematic classification of drugs based on their actions. If Dioscorides is compared, for example, to his near contemporary Scribonius Largus, the difference in outlook is immediately evident. Scribonius organized his book of drugs, called the Compositiones (c. 43-50 c.e.), based on ailments. He begins with compounds useful for headaches and proceeds downward to the patient’s feet. Dioscorides, on the other hand, is concerned with what effect a particular drug has. Much as a modern physician’s reference book classifies drugs into categories such as analgesics, anesthetics, antibiotics, decongestants, and so on, Dioscorides was concerned with whether a particular drug had a warming effect, was an astringent, was a laxative, and so on. Once its properties were established, its medical applications could be discussed. Thus, plants are organized not so much by botanical similarity—as many later writers supposed—as by similar pharmacological properties.

Unfortunately, although the usefulness of Dioscorides’ De materia medica was recognized at once, the potential medical and scientific implications of his attempt at classification were not. By the end of the Roman Empire, his work had been reissued in new editions in which the plants had been arranged alphabetically, undermining the basic principles that Dioscorides had laid out. Thus, while his work continued to receive study, it came to be seen as the culmination of a process rather than the beginning that its author intended. Had this not been the case, the progress of medical science in the next thousand years might well have been drastically different.

Significance

The medical arts in the ancient world had progressed fitfully at best. Despite the genius of individual physicians such as Hippocrates and Galen, the medical profession was often disrupted by internal disputes between rival schools. Pedanius Dioscorides is one of the few writers of his day to rise above such personal concerns and produce a reference work of use to members of all medical schools. His great herbal was a landmark achievement and an instant success.

In terms of his influence, Dioscorides can rightly be placed amid the greatest of ancient medical writers. If he is not to be classed with Hippocrates and Galen, he certainly belongs in the distinguished company of such authorities as Aulus Cornelius Celsus and Pliny the Elder. Until his classification was supplanted by that of Carolus Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, he stood as the foremost authority on pharmacy for more than sixteen hundred years. He was recognized not only by later Roman and Byzantine writers but also by Islamic scholars. Throughout the Middle Ages, his writings were a veritable gold mine of information for herbalists, who often copied his work—in true medieval fashion—without citing their debt to him. Nevertheless, De materia medica was first published as a printed book in 1478, barely twenty years after Johann Gutenberg perfected the use of movable type, and by the sixteenth century, Dioscorides’ writings had found a central position in the curriculum of virtually every university in Europe.

If Dioscorides’ reputation was tarnished by Linnaeus and subsequent followers of “scientific medicine,” it was at least in part because they did not genuinely understand his system. Moreover, it is likely that in years to come Dioscorides will once again be studied and his fame will once again be widespread. In the modern age, many doctors and scientists have become increasingly aware that traditional remedies do, in fact, possess medicinal properties. The plant kingdom, as Dioscorides well knew in the first century, is a giant pharmacopoeia, waiting to be used for the benefit of humankind.

Bibliography

Allbutt, T. Clifford. Greek Medicine in Rome. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970. A very readable, standard survey of Roman medicine by a pioneer in the field. Particularly valuable for an appreciation of Dioscorides is chapter 17, “Pharmacy and Toxicology.”

Collins, Minta. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Shows that treatises on the medical uses of plants date back to the work of Dioscorides, whose teachings formed the basis of Western herbal writings for a millennium and a half.

Gunther, Robert T., ed. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1934. Based on the translation made by John Goodyer in 1655, this work is the only complete translation of Dioscorides’ De materia medica. Includes some 396 illustrations taken from a sixth century c.e. Byzantine manuscript.

Hamilton, J. S. “Scribonius Largus on the Medical Profession.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 60 (1986): 209-216. A translation of and commentary on the preface to the Compositiones of Scribonius Largus, a contemporary of Dioscorides, who addressed many of the same concerns as Dioscorides. He was particularly concerned with the ethical and practical issues relating to the administration of drugs by physicians and with the many internal divisions by which the medical profession of his day was riven.

Riddle, John M. “Dioscorides.” In Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, Annotated Lists, and Guides, edited by F. Edward Cranz and Paul Oskar Kristeller. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1980. The first dozen pages of this article provide a clear and concise synopsis of Dioscorides’ life, career, and influence. The following 130 pages trace his great work, De materia medica, through its tortuous history of subsequent editions and commentaries. This is meant for specialist scholars but will provide students of all levels with insight into the remarkable—and tenuous—process by which knowledge of the ancient world has been preserved.

Riddle, John M. Dioscorides on Pharmacy and Medicine. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. This book not only contains an excellent analysis of the work of Dioscorides but also evaluates the sources of information available for the life of the distinguished pharmacologist. The book is made even more valuable by its extensive bibliography. Contains a number of instructive diagrams and illustrations.

Sadek, M. M. The Arabic “Materia medica” of Dioscorides. Quebec: Éditions du Sphinx, 1983. Provides a brief illustration of the extent to which Dioscorides’ writings had an impact on Arab medicine in the Middle Ages, a period in which Arab physicians equaled or excelled their Western counterparts.

Scarborough, John. Roman Medicine. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. An excellent brief overview of the development and status of the medical profession in the Roman world. The book is extensively illustrated and contains a useful appendix of very brief biographical sketches of Greek and Roman medical writers and practitioners.

Scarborough, John, and Vivian Nutton. “The Preface of Dioscorides’ De materia medica: Introduction, Translation, Commentary.” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 4 (September, 1982): 187-227. This article provides an accurate English translation of Dioscorides’ own preface to De materia medica, along with an extensive commentary. The preface is particularly important because, in it, Dioscorides explains his system of classifying plants and drugs and also reveals virtually all that is known of his own life and medical education.