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Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing, what we would call a drug. 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 pharmacology. In Latin the term literally means "medical matters". One of the most well-known early uses of the term was as the title of a work by the Greek pharmaco-botanist Dioscorides in the first century A.D., entitled de materia medica libri quinque (concerning medical matter in five volumes). This famous commentary covered about 600 plant drugs plus a number of therapeutically useful animal and mineral products.
History and Materia Medica of herbs
Therapeutic use of plants and plant products precedes recorded history and seems to occur in all indigenous and preliterate cultures. We have no record of the original concepts of how these substances were thought to work. When we have explanations from ancient Western or Asian civilizations, or obtained from members of primitive cultures, the proposed explanations can often be charaterized as magical—invoking mechanisms or relationships not recognized by science as natural phenomena.
For example, folk healers among European peasantry believed that some of the visible characteristics of plants provided clues to humans about the specific therapeutic value of each plant-- a concept known as the doctrine of signatures.
In the early twentieth century, the body of knowledge termed materia medica was transformed by the methods and knowledge of medicinal chemistry into the science of pharmacology.
Homeopathy
The term materia medica is still used in homeopathy. Minute dosages of materia medica are used in its lower potency medicines, and in herbal therapy. Homeopathy still considers there to be an inverse relationship between the presence of physical substance and the strength or action of the remedy. The higher potencies are those which have been potentised beyond the last molecule and are believed to act and effect a cure on a metaphysical level.
See also
External links
- Homeopathy Materia Medica - Extensive information about homeopathic materia medica with online books on materia medica.
"Materia medica"