Dioscorides

Unprecedented advances in dental knowledge took place during the Roman imperial period. Dioscorides was a leader in the field of traditional dental pharmacology both with his original work "De Materia Medica" and the spurious "Euporista". Thanks to Dioscorides we have an early classification of oral and dental diseases and a greater understanding of dental practice in the first post-Christian centuries. Dioscorides advocated more than 120 drugs for the treatment of toothache and diseases of the gingiva and oral mucosa. Most striking is the use of different verb forms to describe the effects of the drugs he proposes.

"In this study medicinal uses of Algae and Mosses are investigated in manuscripts of İbn-i Baytar (Ibn al Baithar), İbn-i Sina (Avicenna), Huneyn bin İshak (Joannitus), Dioscorides and Plinius. Ulva lactuca and Fucus sp. have been identified according to the descriptions given in these manuscripts. It is designated that the Arabic term “Tuhlub” occupies both the meanings of any algal species and Lemna minor
of Spermatophyta."

ENGLISH ABSTRACT
Book IV of Dioscorides' pharmacological treatise De materia medica includes an apocryphal interpolation on the μυροβάλανον κίτρινον. This short text is present in both in the Aldine edition of 1499 and in twelve manuscripts, the oldest of which is Par. gr. 2183, copied at the Monastery of St John Prodromos at Petra in the middle of the 14th century. I here offer the Greek text along with a Spanish translation and commentary. I pay special attention to a number of botanical terms foreign to classical Greek, to which Greek-Eastern botanical glossaries transmitted in many Byzantine manuscripts assign an Arabic origin. I argue that the main source for this interpolation is a text by the Byzantine doctor Ioannes Zacharias Aktouarios, a good connoisseur of Arabic medicine. The library-scriptorium of the Monastery of St John Prodromos was presumably the place where this interpolation was carried out.
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RESUMEN ESPAÑOL
El tratado farmacológico de Dioscórides De materia medica presenta dentro del Libro IV una interpolación apócrifa sobre el μυροβάλανον κίτρινον. Este breve texto está presente en la edición aldina de 1499 y en doce manuscritos de los que el más antiguo es el Par. gr. 2183, copiado en el monasterio de S. Juan Pródromo-Petra a mediados del s. XIV. Se ofrece el texto griego acompañado de traducción española y comentario y se presta especial atención a una serie de términos botánicos ajenos al griego clásico y para los que los léxicos botánicos greco-orientales transmitidos en muchos manuscritos bizantinos delatan un origen árabe. Se demuestra que la principal fuente de esta interpolación procede de la obra del médico bizantino de la primera mitad del s. XVI Juan Zacarías Actuario, buen conocedor de la medicina árabe, y que el scriptorium-biblioteca del monasterio de Pródromo-Petra fue el lugar en el que presumiblemente se produjo tal interpolación.