‘The subject of simple drugs, most honoured Andromachus, is naturally more agreeable than that of compounds, since it is readily understood and its materials are readily available.’
So opens the treatise On Simples attributed to Dioscorides and now translated into English by John Fitch (Fig. 1).
Though not written by Dioscorides, the most authoritative Greek author on medical materials, animal, vegetable and mineral, and of uncertain date (somewhere between the first and fourth centuries CE), this is an important text nonetheless. Simples—remedies based on a single active ingredient (mostly plant products)—were the bread and butter of ancient Greek and Roman medicine, but this is the only extant treatise dedicated to the subject.