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The first medical book published in the American colonies The English Physician is a humble vest-pocket-sized 94-page medical guide for the common person, by the prolific herbalist and author Nicholas Culpeper. It was a staple in 17th-century England, as it was short, written in accessible prose, and inexpensive; and perhaps as attractive, it took a decidedly skeptical view of'official'medicine, relying instead on popular remedies. Culpeper's philosophy was to teach the common folk to minister to themselves by providing them with the tools and knowledge for self-help. Published in Boston in 1708 by Nicholas Boone, the American version of The English Physician was widely cited and used at the time. Today only five copies are known to exist. The rarity of this vade mecum of colonial America is wrapped in mystery: Who really wrote this book and when, where, and how did it originate? The editor illuminates these mysteries while adding an informative historical introduction on the state of medical knowledge and practice at the time, exploring Culpeper's position among competing medical writers, and glossing the medical and botanical terms, providing contemporary equivalents. Modern readers will discover the meaning behind the strangely named brews and concoctions of the 17th century and will learn how this Boston printing literally transformed the American landscape with herbs brought from the British colonists'homeland.

Hildegard von Bingen ist nicht nur wegen ihrer visionär-prophetischen Schriften und ihrer musikalischen Schöpfungen eine herausragende Gestalt des deutschen Mittelalters, sie hat auch mit ihrem naturkundlich-heilpraktischen Werk Physica großen Einfluss ausgeübt, der bis in die Gegenwart reicht. Allerdings wurde die bisherige Standardausgabe aus dem Jahr 1855 ihrem Werk nur unzureichend gerecht, weil die wichtigsten Handschriften erst im Nachhinein entdeckt worden sind – die authentischste sogar erst im Jahre 1983. Diese Florentiner Handschrift konnte der neuen Textausgabe als Grundlage dienen, wobei aber auch die gesamte übrige Überlieferung wesentlich zur Textkonstitution beiträgt. Das Ergebnis ist ein fast um das Doppelte erweiterter Text, wobei in den bisher nicht bekannten Teilen vor allem kombinierte Rezepturen im Vordergrund stehen, die unter den Aspekten der schon in der Antike vorgeprägten mittelalterlichen Humoralpathologie erstellt wurden. Ihre Gültigkeit bis in die Gegenwart ist in Fachkreisen ein heiß umstrittenes Thema. Dass das Werk als Naturlehre in der langen Tradition eines Isidor von Sevilla und des Summarium Heinrici steht, konnte erst durch die begleitenden Forschungen bei der Erarbeitung dieser Textausgabe nachgewiesen werden. – Ein kommentiertes Wörterbuch zu den deutschen Wörtern der Physica ist in Vorbereitung.

For 1,600 years Dioscorides (ca. AD 40–80) was regarded as the foremost authority on drugs. He knew mild laxatives and strong purgatives, analgesics for headaches, antiseptics for wounds, emetics to rid one of ingested poisons, chemotherapy agents for cancer treatments, and even oral contraceptives. Why, then, have his works remained obscure in recent centuries? Because of one small oversight (Dioscorides himself thought it was self-evident): he failed to describe his method for organizing drugs by their affinities. This omission led medical authorities to use his materials as a guide to pharmacy while overlooking Dioscorides'most valuable contribution—his empirically derived method for observing and classifying drugs by clinical testing. Dioscorides'De materia medica, a five-volume work, was written in the first century. Here revealed for the first time is the thesis that Dioscorides wrote more than a lengthy guide book. He wrote a great work of science. He had said that he discovered the natural order and would demonstrate it by his arrangement of drugs from plants, minerals, and animals. Until John M. Riddle's pathfinding study, no one saw the genius of his system. Botanists from the eighteenth century often attempted to find his unexplained method by identifying the sequences of his plants according to the Linnean system but, while there are certain patterns, there remained inexplicable incoherencies. However, Dioscorides'natural order as set down in De materia medica was determined by drug affinities as detected by his acute, clinical ability to observe drug reactions in and on the body. So remarkable was his ability to see relationships that, in some cases, he saw what we know to be common chemicals shared by plants of the same and related species and other natural product drugs from animal and mineral sources. Western European and Islamic medicine considered Dioscorides the foremost authority on drugs, just as Hippocrates is regarded as the Father of Medicine. They saw him point the way but only described the end of his finger, despite the fact that in the sixteenth century alone there were over one hundred books published on him. If he had explained what he thought to be self-evident, then science, especially chemistry and medicine, would almost certainly have developed differently. In this culmination of over twenty years of research, Riddle employs modern science and anthropological studies innovatively and cautiously to demonstrate the substance to Dioscorides'authority in medicine.