Mattioli, Pietro

Mattioli, Pietro. II Dioscoride delVeccellente Dottor P. A. Matthioli. Venice, 1548. 

In 1799 Luigi Palcani published analyses of two authentic specimens of natural Oriental natrum one which Pietro Andrea Mattioli had brought, more than two centuries before, from Constantinople for Ulisse Aldrovandi s Museum of Natural History, and another which Edward Wortley Montague had brought from Alexandria. Palcani found, as du Hamel had stated, that the natrum was composed mainly of sodium carbonate (43). It also contained varying amounts of sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride, sodium sulfate, and water (44). 

Apart from the works of Severinus and Andernach, a further impulse toward the inclusion of chemical medicaments within the practice of medicine in France and elsewhere came about as a result of a famous commentary on the works of the ancient Roman pharmacist Dioscorides, written by the well-known sixteenth-century naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500-1577). The text was published in Latin in 1544 and a French translation appeared in 1561. The book included reference to the use of stones, minerals, and metals and it explained how antimony, which had been described by Paracelsus, could be rendered into an effective purgative. What Mattioli did, in other words, was to situate Paracelsus within an ancient tradition of preparing medicines from minerals and metals. 

In his 1548 commentary on Dioscurides, Pietro Mattioli worried that faulty transmission of classical medicinal knowledge had given rise to misidenti-fications of materia medica, leading physicians unwittingly to prescribe poisons as pharmaceutical remedies. See Pietro Mattioli, II Dioscoride dell eccellente Dottor P. A. Matthioli (Venice, 1548) and Richard Palmer, Pharmacy in the republic of Venice in the Sixteenth Century, in The... 

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See also in sourсe #XX -- [ , ]

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