Dioscorides’ work remained the canonical authority on drugs for more than 1,500 years. The role of pharmakopola, or drug-sellers, in the classical world was taken over by the apothecaries of medieval Europe. These were seen as distinct fTom and inferior to physicians, who consulted in the Hippocratic manner and directed their patients to apothecaries only if drug prescriptions were needed. The remainder of the apothecary trade was with the general public, to whom they supplied ‘simples’ (mostly dried herbs) or ‘Galenics’, a range of standard compounds and preparations intended to rebalance the body’s humours, in accord with classical medical theory.
Dioscorides’ Materia medica remained a standard text until early modern times: this page of a German edition from 1549 recommends the use of mandrake wine before surgical operations. (Wellcome Library, London)
The word ‘drug’ came into common English usage around ad 1400, probably derived from the Dutch term for ‘dried goods’, and it was also around this time that the nature of drugs began to attract the curiosity of the emerging humanists and natural philosophers. As new texts added to the store of chemical knowledge, practitioners gradually began to understand that drugs might be isolated as ‘pure’ substances that functioned independently of the plants that contained them, and that their effects on the mind might have a material and discoverable cause.
This process began around 1500 with the circulation of printed herbals, one of the earliest book genres to proliferate after the invention of movable type. A new edition of Dioscorides, published in 1499 and based on Greek manuscript sources that had been lost since antiquity, acted as a spur to the new learning. Herbals became more detailed and their drawings more naturalistic. Botanical gardens spread across Europe, and the first chair of botany was established at the University of Padua in 1533. By the end of the century thousands of plants had been identified, catalogued and illustrated.
An apothecary’s shop, from a text published in Augsburg, Germany in 1496. An apprentice prepares remedies with a pestle and mortar to add to the jars on the shelves, while learned apothecaries gather in the foreground. (Wellcome Library, London)
Illustrators at work on one of the most celebrated Renaissance herbals, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes published in Basel by Leonhard Fuchs in 1542. In 1703, Fuchs’s contribution to botany was commemorated in the name of the Fuchsia genus of flowering plants. (Wellcome Library, London)
The cannabis plant appears in many of these early works, though not for its psychoactive properties. European hemp, low in mind-altering cannabinoids, was mainly grown for textile production - its Latin name supplied the term ‘canvas’ - though it was also held to have medical virtues, such as the use of its seeds for headaches. As the new herbal conventions established themselves through the sixteenth century, mind-altering drugs came to be grouped loosely together under the rubric of ‘narcotics’. This was a category that united the opium poppy, by now well established as one of the most important remedies in the pharmacopeia, with the extensive and sinister family of intoxicant nightshades that included henbane, belladonna, datura, mandrake (mandragora), aconite (wolfsbane) and hemlock. These plants, held to be under the influence of Saturn, could be effective analgesics and sedatives but, as Dioscorides had stressed, dosage was critical: rather than aiding sleep, they might produce excitement and feverish hallucinations, or irregular heatbeats and frenzied seizures leading to heart-stopping convulsions, coma and death. Combined carefully with opium, they made a potent, if ill-starred, brew, the ‘drowsy syrups’ of ‘poppy and mandragora’ that by the time of Shakespeare’s Othello had become proverbial agents of oblivion.
Fuchs’s herbal details the medical uses of around 500 plants, arranged in alphabetical order. The book includes entries on the cannabis plant, the poppy and the mandrake, assembling the opinions of classical authorities alongside carefully observed and lavishly printed illustrations. (Wellcome Library, London)
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