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Looking to nature to learn how to care for ourselves

Dioscorides’ name belongs to one of the great adventures of ancient knowledge: observing plants, describing their properties and passing on what might be useful in daily life. His best-known work, De materia medica, is not exactly a bestiary of fantastic animals, but an extraordinary repertory of natural substances—especially plants—and the uses attributed to them.

Pedanius Dioscorides was a Greek physician of the first century CE, living in the Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire. He travelled, listened to collectors and specialists, compared names and gathered knowledge circulating through markets, fields and medical practices. His book was born at a time when knowing a plant also meant knowing how to recognise it, obtain it, prepare it and place trust in it.

What fascinates us is not only the number of substances he records, but the way he looks at them: observe, name, compare and leave a record so that someone else can identify what is being discussed. Nature does not appear here as an abstraction, but as a world of scents, roots, seeds, poisons and remedies with concrete consequences.

A book that travelled through the centuries

De materia medica was copied, translated, illustrated and commented on for almost two thousand years. It moved from Greek into Latin, Arabic and other languages; each translation opened new doors, but also introduced uncertainties around names and identifications. The famous Vienna Dioscorides, illustrated in Constantinople in the sixth century, shows how each age imagined Dioscorides’ plants anew.

Reading it today requires context. Its explanations do not replace modern medicine, and its recipes should not be used as treatments. They do, however, allow us to follow the emergence of an essential question: how does an experience of nature become shared knowledge?

Every list reveals what an age could see, name and consider valuable.

To think further: the boundary between experience, description and evidence—and the responsibility that begins when an observation becomes a recommendation.