Early Herbal II(continue from Early Herbal I)
The Phoenician were still trading in the Mediterranean during the great period of Greek culture, and supplied the city states with spices and aromatics the long lifetime of the famous Greek doctor, Hippocrates, whose scientific writings and practical work ridiculed the supernatural aspect of primitive medicine.
His straight forward, modest books emphasized the importance of diet and hygiene; he included about about 400 simple herbal remedies and was also the first to set out the theory that disease is caused by an imbalance between the four bodily humors.
The century after Hippocrates, Theophrastus, a pupil of both Plato and Aristotle, wrote his Enquiry into Plants, a study of the structure of plants and the first attempt at plant classification.
But although some important theories arose form this ‘Aristotelian’ botany it was in those treatises written from a medical rather than from a botanical view point that really practical advances were made towards the identification of herbs and their properties.
Of these, the most important was the medical treatise De Materia Medica, written during the 1st century AD by a Greek physician living in Rome.
A copy of manuscript was illustrated in about AD 512 with naturalistic watercolor drawings, and the complete work provided the basis for herbal writing, illustration and medical theory for at least 1,600 years.
A contemporary of Dioscorides was Pliny the Elder, a Roman civil servant whose Natural History included several volumes in medical botany.
Although his scientific observations were heavily larded with superstition, the sheer size of the work has made it a valuable source of reference for herbal writers.
Early Herbal II
