Interpreting materia medica. A case study on Ioannes Archiatrus.

Background: Premodern medical texts are an invaluable source for scholars from humanities and sciences. However, they are usually not accessible as few scientists with an interest in premodern materia medica are also qualified philologists. Therefore, a balance has to be struck to translate these texts while preserving information on how reliable we believe a given translation to be.

Pharmaceutical Terminology in Ancient and Medieval Time - and Others.

Ancient and medieval pharmacological and medical texts contain a substantial amount of plant and mineral names. In some cases, the identification is straightforward. But for the majority of the data, we are unable to identify these ingredients with high certainty.

A systematic methodology to assess the identity of plants in historical texts: A case study based on the Byzantine pharmacy text John the Physician's Therapeutics.

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: In recent decades, the study of historical texts has attracted research interest, particularly in ethnopharmacology. All studies of the materia medica cited in ancient and medieval texts share a concern, however, as to the reliability of modern identifications of these substances. Previous studies of European or Mediterranean texts relied mostly on authoritative dictionaries or glossaries providing botanical identities for the historical plant names in question.

The indirect tradition of Paul of Aegina in Ioannes archiatrus.

This paper explores the tradition from Paul of Aegina to both the original and vernacular version of Ioannes archiatrus. Here, Theophanes Chrysobalantes (Nonnos) seems to have an intermediate position, but it is not entirely clear whether there were intermediary sources that are now lost. The analysis shows a considerable variance in the structure, content and style of the main chapter text, but a great similarity in the chapter headings.