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Ethnopharmacological Relevance: The relationship between food and medicines has long been investigated and is of crucial importance for the understanding of the development of ethnopharmacological knowledge through time. Hippocrates, considered the Father of Medicine, is credited with an aphorism equating food and medicine. No inquiry has been performed, however, into the collection of texts attributed to Hippocrates and, going beyond, into this statement, which is generally accepted without further examination. A clarification is much needed as the question of the relationship between food and medicines as potent substances are crucial to ethnopharmacology., Materials and Methods: To verify the validity (if not the authenticity) of the theory on the identity of food and medicine attributed to Hippocrates, we digitized the whole collection of texts ascribed to Hippocrates in the original Greek language (the so-called Hippocratic Collection), which date back from the age of Hippocrates (late 5th century and 4th century BCE) to a more recent time (2nd century CE). On this basis, we extracted and databased all the information related to remedial therapy, that is, their materia medica (vegetable, animal and mineral) and their use(s). We identified both the plant species according to modern up-to-date taxonomy and the medical conditions as precisely as possible. We then screened these plants to discover what their uses were and, going backward in time, we examined (when possible) their native distribution, domestication, possible introduction (in the case of non-native species) and cultivation to determine whether these species had been known for a long time and might have been the object of long-term observation as both foodstuffs and medicines., Results: Tabulated data from the Hippocratic Collection revealed that 40% of the remedies in the Collection are made out of only 44 plants. Of this group, 33 species (=75% of the group) were also used for nutritional purposes in Antiquity. Domestication history of these species indicates that humans have long been in contact with them, something that the medical uses of these species confirm, as they are multiple and finely distinguished. A pilot analysis of archeological remains of medicines confirms that textual evidence corresponds to physical evidence, that is, to the practice of medicine. As a consequence, textual information can be accepted as reflecting actual practice., Conclusions: Although the pseudo-aphorism according to which food are medicines and medicines are food does not appear as such in the Hippocratic Collection, it aptly expresses a fundamental element of the Hippocratic approach to therapeutics, without being, however, a creation of neither Hippocrates nor his followers and the physicians who practiced a form of medicine in the way of Hippocrates. A vast majority of the core group of plant species used for the preparation of medicines were also consumed as foodstuff. Knowledge and use of these plants probably resulted from a long co-existence in the same environment and also from multiple experiences of trial and error over millennia, whose results accumulated over time and contributed to the formation of the Mediterranean medical tradition., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Ethnopharmacological Relevance: Transmission of ethnopharmacological knowledge over a long period of time and across a vast area or between botanically or culturally/scientifically unrelated regions of the world is a fundamental issue in ethnopharmacology, as it traces continuity and transformation(s) of the data to be submitted to analysis for evaluation. In the context of present interest in Eastern medicine (particularly Indian and Chinese), we ask questions about the transmission of knowledge from the East to the Mediterranean. In the first part, we survey available literature on trade between the two areas and, in the second, we present preliminary micro-cases (data, analysis and interpretation) in order to verify the feasibility of a comparative study., Materials and Methods: Based on the assumption of native areas of origin and/or domestication of plants and one other natural product (musk), we have screened relevant sources (pharmacological literature) in the original language searching for explicit information about Indian and/or Chinese materia medica. We have concentrated our attention on knowledge of the origin of the materia medica under study, their therapeutic applications, the explanations provided for their activity, and the knowledge of the living plants and animals as demonstrated through their representations., Results: Relevant data come from the Hippocratic Collection in ancient Greece (5th century B.C.E.) to the Renaissance in the 16th century. The corpus of materia medica and drugs collected in this preliminary study include pepper and myrrh (5th century B.C.E.), ginger (1st century C.E.), a dozen plants and drugs in the period 9th to 13th century (e.g. camphor, clove, galanga, nutmeg), cinnamon (11th century and later), eggplant, banana tree and musk (13th-16th century). Whereas the Eastern origin of such products was known, the exact area was not always. Judging from their representations, the plants and animals producing the drugs studied here were not necessarily known. Compared therapeutic uses of the drugs did not correspond to those in the area of origin, even though some knowledge of such original uses was preserved., Conclusions: This study warrants the very possibility of a comparative analysis of different historical pharmacological traditions. It highlights both continuities and innovations in the transmission of information from the East (India and China) to the Mediterranean, suggests interpretations on the processes brought to light and opens the door to a further systematic study that will expand the documentary corpus, collect additional material, and also confirm and refine our interpretations. Such an approach is expected to play a fundamental role in the collection of historical ethnopharmacological data and to be applicable to traditions other than the Eastern and Mediterranean ones., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)