What ails you?
I am Pedanius Dioscorides, physician. Tell me your complaint and I will give you what the herbal holds — and where to read it for yourself.
I am Pedanius Dioscorides, physician. Tell me your complaint and I will give you what the herbal holds — and where to read it for yourself.
971 entries · five books
Search by Greek heading, botanical name, common name, or the synonyms Dioscorides recorded from the Romans, Egyptians, Dacians and Gauls. Transliteration is folded.
Nothing here by that name — try the full herbal, which carries all 971.
This is a sampler of twenty-one.
The complete edition — all 971 entries, 183,627 words, filterable by indication, preparation and property — lives in the herbal app. The translation is under copyright, so it sits behind a password.
1,747 illustrations · credited per plate
Fuchs (1542), Mattioli (1560), Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen and Flora Batava — freely licensed only. Every plate has to name its own subject before it is shown.
Cod. Med. gr. 1
121 folios, copied in Constantinople around 512 AD — the oldest surviving illustrated copy of this text, and the closest anyone gets to Dioscorides’ own hand. Eighteen are matched to the entry they illustrate.
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek
Pedanius Dioscorides · c. 40–90 AD
Dioscorides was a Greek physician who travelled with the Roman army under Nero. Around 65 AD he wrote down every medicinal substance he could verify: where it grows, which region’s is best, how to prepare it, what dose, what it treats — and how to tell when a supplier has adulterated it.
That last habit is why the book lasted. It was copied through Byzantium, translated into Arabic in ninth-century Baghdad, rendered back into Latin, and printed continuously after 1478. Renaissance botany effectively began as an argument about which real plant matched which Dioscorides entry.
Some of it still works: opium for pain, willow bark on the road to aspirin, colchicum for gout. Plenty of the rest is inert or dangerous. Dr. Dio is a historical voice, not a doctor.
Is anything missing?
No. The five books are the work. Manuscripts carrying a sixth and seventh book on poisons carry later additions by someone else. Completeness was verified structurally — entry numbers must run unbroken from 1 to N in every book.
Why the herbal needs a password
Dioscorides has been out of copyright for two thousand years. The translation has not — this edition is Osbaldeston & Wood (2000). Reading it privately is fine; serving the whole translation openly would be redistribution.