The Works of Pedanios Dioscorides

This month's exhibit focuses on the works of Pedanios Dioscorides, the ancient Greek writer who was the father of medical botany. Born in Anazarbus in Cilicia (modern southern Turkey), Dioscorides studied medicine under Areios at Tarsus, and served as a physician and soldier in the Roman armies in the period when Nero, Caligula, and Claudius were Emperors.

His fame rests upon his pharmaceutical book, best known by its Latin title of De materia medica, which was written in Greek in about 60 A.D. As originally formulated, the work was divided into five books. The first book dealt with aromatic plants, oils, ointments, trees and shrubs; the second with animals, animal parts, milk and dairy products, cereals, and sharp herbs; the third with roots, juices, herbs, and seeds; the fourth with herbs and roots not previously mentioned; and the fifth with wines and minerals. These are sometimes accompanied by a sixth book which deals with poisons, and on rare occasions by a seventh and eighth book dealing with animal bites and venomous animals.

The work served as the cornerstone for western pharmaceutical and herbal writing for the next 1500 years and was early translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Persian as well as Latin exerting a profound influence on the development of medicine in the Near East as well as in Europe. Over the centuries of manuscript copying numerous scribal errors crept into the text. these were compounded by the tendency of European scholars and physicians to equate local plants with the Asian flora discussed in the original text to produce misidentification of numerous plants with sometimes disastrous results. With the dawn of the Renaissance in Europe scholars and physicians were finally able to put aside the unquestioning dictates imposed by the medieval concept of auctoritas and begin reexamining the work on several fronts. Initially scholarship focused on a comparison of different versions of the text to eliminate scrbal error. Later, however, scholars and physicians began looking at the plants themselves, sometimes journeying in the footsteps of Dioscorides to find the plants originally cited, other times making a more sedentary journey through the works of the numerous writers who had built the materia medica on Dioscorides' works with an eye to clarifying which plant was which, while yet others of a more daring bent conducted experiments with the plants on patients and recorded their observations.

While the first printed edition of Dioscorides dates from the late 1470's, the earliest edition at The Holden Arboretum is considerably later. Thus our display begins with the 1559 edition of Les Six Livres de la Matiere Medicinale, a French translation by a French physician named Martin Mathée based on the Latin translation of Jean Ruel and including an abridged translation of some of the commentaries of Pier Andrea Mattioli.

Much of the remainder of our exhibit is concerned with the work of Mattioli (1501-1577) who set out to be the foremost expert on the works of Dioscorides. The son of an Italian physician, Mattioli followed in his father's footsteps, obtaining a medical degree at a young age and having a successful practice in Siena, Rome, and Trent before becoming city physician to Gorizia. While conducting his medical career he also began translating and editing the works of Dioscorides. From early on he began adding commentaries to the work with his observations on the references to the plants in other writers, his own observations and opinions, and what he believed to be the relationships of the increasing corpus of newly discovered plants to those discussed by Dioscorides. His earliest published work on Dioscorides was an Italian edition of 1544, with his first Latin version that published by Valgrisi at Venice in 1554. It was this latter edition which brought Mattioli to the attention of Emperor Ferdinand I who summoned him to Prague in 1555 to treat the illness of the Archduke Maximilian. This led to his involvement with the lucrative court trade of Vienna and Prague and his appointment as physician to Archduke Ferdinand I and Emperor Maximilian II.

Meanwhile the editions of Mattioli's publications of Dioscorides' works proliferated, although the original text of the author became increasingly hard to find due to the voluminous nature of Mattioli's commentaries on it. Editions illustrated with small woodcuts began appearing with the Italian edition of 1555 and the Latin edition of 1558. Our first Mattioli edition on display is the fourth Latin edition with the small woodcuts of the Commentarii in sex libros Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei de materia medica published in 1570 by Vincent Valgrisi in Vienna.

It is followed by one of the editions most prized by collectors, the 1565 Validisi imprint which is the first to feature the large woodcuts done by Giorgio Liberale and Wolfgang Meyerpeck.

In his later years Mattioli became increasingly obsessed with being the ultimate authority on the works of Dioscorides and increasingly intolerant of anyone who had the temerity to disagree with his interpretation. One of the less well-positioned scholars who made the mistake of publicly disagreeing with Mattioli was Juan Rodriguez de Castello Branco, a Christianized Jew of Spanish extraction who was born in Portugal. Writing under the pseudonym of Amatus Lusitanus he wrote his own commentaries on Dioscorides, which publicly disagreed not only with the interpretations of Mattioli, but with some of those of Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs. and Jean Ruel as well. These culminated in his In Dioscoridis Anazarbei de materia medica Libros Quinque Enarrationes published in 1558. Mattioli responded with a scathing attack entitled Apologia adversus Amathum Lusitanum which is on view in the next work on display, the first edition of Mattioli's collected works, the Opera of 1598. The combination of Mattioli's attack and the accession of Pope Paul VI, who actively promoted a program of persecuting the Christianized Jews, combined to make Amatus a target of the Inquisition and force his flight from one place to another before finally setting in a Jewish colony in Salonica where his tenure was quickly cut short by his death of the plague contracted from one of his patients.

Slightly more fortunate was Luigi Anguillara, an Italian physician and scholar, who had worked with Luigi Ghini in the Bologna Botanical Garden before becoming the first director of the botanical garden at Padua. Anguillara, like Mattioli, was fascinated with the works of Dioscorides, but unlike Mattioli, who relied on information and plant specimens provided by travelers and correspondents, Anguillara traveled extensively in pursuit of the plants mentioned by the ancient author while also collecting and studying new plants. the results of his researches were contained in a series of letters to his patron which were eventually published in 1561 as the Semplici. Unfortunately the work contradicted some of Mattioli's views and earned him the enmity of both Mattioli and Ulisse Aldrovandi which is believed to have led to his forced resignation from his posts at Padua in the same year that his publication appeared.

Others, of course, had earlier used Dioscorides in the composition of their herbals - often, however, giving European species the names of the Asian plants cited by Dioscorides, as we have already noted. One of these authors is Otto Brunfels whose Herbarum vivae eicones is noted for its pioneer use of realistic botanical illustrations in the form of the masterful woodcuts of Hans Weiditz. While the Warren H. Corning Collection of Horticultural Classics lacks a copy of Brunfels' herbal, it does have a rarer item related to it, which is the next book on display. The In Dioscoridis historiam certissima adaptio of 1543 is a collection of just the woodcut images of plants cited by Dioscorides and their labels abstracted from Brunfels' herbal by his publisher and published as a somewhat less bulky volume which could be more easily carried into the field for plant identification.

The quest for the plants mentioned by Dioscorides was not confined to the sixteenth century. In 1786, John Sibthorp, and English physician and botanist, who had succeeded his father as Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford, began his quest for the plants mentioned by Dioscorides with a trip to Vienna to view the oldest surviving manuscript of Dioscorides' work, the magnificent illustrated Codex Vindobonensis. While there he met the young artist Ferdinand Bauer, whom he persuaded to accompany him on his expedition to Greece and Asia Minor the following year. They returned to Oxford together where Sibthorp worked on his notes and Bauer worked on illustrations for them. In 1794, Sibthorp set out on a second expedition to the Levant, Bauer being left behind to continue his work, when he returned in 1795 he brought back with him an unspecified disease which proved to be fatal. Sibthorp's devotion to Dioscorides was not to die with him, however, since he left his entire estate to Oxford University on the condition that they publish the results of his expedition. The task of turning Sibthorp's rough notes fell initially to Sir James Edward Smith, the purchaser of Linnaeus's library and collections and founder of the Linnean Society, who managed to get the first of the ten volumes of the Flora Graeca published in 1806, but did not live to complete the project, dying after completing part of volume seven. The remaining portion of volume seven and the final three volumes were completed by John Lindley and the last volume published in 1840. All of the volumes contained full-size engravings of the plants done by Bauer, James Sowerby, and James de Carle Sowerby after Bauer's originals.

One of the classic rare books, the Flora Graeca was initially issued by subscription at enormous expense and only somewhere between twenty and thirty copies are believed to have been produced. Approximately forty additional copies of the text leaves appear to have been printed and these were sold to H. G. Bohn who had new illustrations printed from the original plates on paper dated from 1845 to 1847 to accompany them. It is a volume from our set of this latter issue which rounds out our current display of works by and about Pedanios Dioscorides.

This is the text of the exhibit on display in the Rare Book Room of The Holden Arboretum from January 4 through February 2, 2001. The Rare Book is located at the rear of the Warren H. Corning Library in the Warren H. Corning Library and Visitors Center, 9500 Sperry Road, Kirtland Ohio 44060. The exhibit is normally on view Tuedays through Fridays from 10 AM to 4:45 PM and is admission is included in the price of admission to the grounds.

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