Herbs Of The Field And Herbs Of The Garden In Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy.pdf

This is an extract from:

Byzantine Garden Culture

edited by Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire,

and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn

published by

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Washington, D.C.

Trustees for Harvard University

Washington, D.C.

Printed in the United States of America

www.doaks.org/etexts.html

Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden

in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy

John Scarborough

erent picture of Byzantine botanical lore than if research

depends solely on evidence drawn from gardens.

An interested student or scholar wishing to inquire about the essentials of herbalism in

the Byzantine Empire likely will be led into the Greek texts on gardens, well illustrated by

the Christian “dream garden” as published in Greek, with a French and now English trans-

lation, by Margaret Thomson. 1 Within are, indeed, the expected fruits and vegetables, sweet

smelling and pleasantly verdant, along with some descriptions of “how to plant a garden.”

Presumably technical names, however, are not intended as a guide for the reader, but rather

suggest how an ideal garden would appear. For example, in Thomson’s text is the “knowl-

edge of smilax, ” 2 and one reads an ethereal account of the possible shapes of such a tree, but

nothing one could designate as “practical.” Thomson’s notes on Jardin, 21, indicate biblical

allusions, but nothing concerning botanical, agricultural, or medical utility. Smilax here is a

tree ( to dendron ), so that one need not bother to consider other plants with the same name,

for example, the cowpea or cherry bean as described by Dioskorides, 3 or the European

sarsaparilla

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rst noted by Pliny the Elder and Dioskorides, 4 probably drawing information

1 M. H. Thomson, ed. and trans., Le jardin symbolique (Paris, 1960); and The Symbolic Garden: Re ﬂ ections

Drawn from a Garden of Virtues. A XIIth Century Greek Manuscript (North York, Ont., 1989).

2 Le jardin symbolique, 68–77; The Symbolic Garden, 86–95.

3 Vigna unguiculata L. = V. sinensis Endl., the cowpea or cherry bean, as in Dioskorides, Materia medica,

2.132 and 146 (Greek text ed. M. Wellmann, Pedanii Dioscuridis Anazarbei De materia medica, 3 vols. [Berlin, 1906–

14; repr. Berlin, 1958], 1:132 and 146).

4 Smilax aspera L., Dioskorides, 4.137 and 142 (ed. Wellmann, 2:282–83 and 285–86). Pliny the Elder,

Natural History, 16.163 and 24.82–83. The common source is probably the lost tract on medical botany by

Sextius Niger ( ﬂ . probably early 1st century).

Among scholarly studies of Byzantine gardens are a number that provide details about what

plants were grown and why they were cultivated as a common practice. Yet little attention

has been paid to the botanical and pharmacal particulars of Byzantine garden lore. More-

over, even less well known are the all-season plant gatherers of the Byzantine Empire, plant

collectors who continually augmented the herbal drugs of the monasteries. By focusing on

some aspects of the gathering of wild specimens, which were, in many ways, “taken for

granted,” one receives a rather di

178 John Scarborough

from a common source; nor does one need to posit the infamous scammony (occasionally

called smilax ) with its well-known cathartic resin. 5

Two trees are possible: Taxus baccata L., the so-called English yew, renowned in medi-

eval Asia Minor for its heavy and hard, yet elastic, wood (thus the English “yew-bow” of

folklore 6 , and, second, the ever-popular tree of an enchanted grove, the holm oak ( Quercus

ilex L.), 7 with its prickly, hollylike sucker-shoot leaves. Centuries earlier, Theophrastus had

remarked that the name is “Arcadian,” and sinceThomson’s text leaves little doubt about the

fairy-tale purpose of the anonymous writer, it seems clear enough that this famed “dream

garden” manual is just that: an imaginary world of fragrances and wafting breezes, of pruned

shapes and colorful

c plants: Thomson herself had called attention to other and varying

traditions of more practical utility in her seldomly cited Textes grecs inédits relatifs aux plantes, 10

texts in themselves supplementary to those on botany (and other topics) as edited and

published earlier by Delatte. 11 Important is Thomson’s section of Greek texts (with French

translations) of botanical lexicography, 12 paralleled by Delatte’s

fteen botanical glossaries, 13

only slightly emended by J. Stannard. 14 Delatte’s glossaries include one by a Pseudo-Galen, 15

nine by anonymous authors, one by a Pseudo-Symeon Seth, 16 and one each by Neophytos,

Nikomedes, and Nicholas Hieropais, followed by Thomson’s Greek text of a “Lexicon of

Arabic Plant Names,” 17 leading into several more tracts of similar content and with the

obviously intended purposes of pure lexicography. These are not the vaguely perceived or

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5 Convolvulus sepium L. is the most common, cosmopolitan species of scammony, still used in Greece,

Turkey, and Syria as a powerful cathartic. In some botanical guides, the plant bears the name C. scammonia. W h y

Smilax, in ancient Greek botanical nomenclature, should sometimes take the place of skammonia is a lexico-

graphical mystery. The scammony’s main pharmaceutical action is its properties to cause large amounts of bodily

ﬂ uids to be evacuated, which explains why many modern herbal manuals describe it as a “diuretic.”

6 Dioskorides, 4.76 and 79 (ed. Wellmann, 2:88–89 and 92–93). Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 16.51.

7 Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, 3.16.2; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 16.19.

8 Thomson, Le jardin symbolique, 10–11; The Symbolic Garden, 10–11.

9 A. Delatte, Herbarius: Recherches sur le cérémonial usité chez les anciens pour la cueillette des simples et des plantes

magiques (Paris, 1938).

10 Paris, 1955.

11 A. Delatte, ed., Anecdota Atheniensia et alia, vol. 2, Textes grecs à l’histoire des sciences (Paris, 1939).

12 Thomson, Textes grecs, 125–77.

13 Delatte, Anecdota, 273–454.

14 J. Stannard, “Byzantine Botanical Lexicography,” Episteme 5 (1971): 168–87.

15 Delatte, Anecdota, 385–92.

16 Ibid., 339–60.

17 Thomson, Textes grecs, 139–67; Delatte, Anecdota, 279–318, 331–39, and 393–417.

owers and equally colorful fruits edible only with the nose and eyes.

Thomson attributes this “garden of the imagination” to the eleventh century, 8 and there is

an ancestry in similar tracts of pagan antiquity, such as those published by A. Delatte in the

Herbarius. 9 Delatte’s texts retail the plants of medical astrology, with seven major kinds of

plants linked with planets also of extremely important ceremonial use and prominence in

mythology.

Yet this genre of the “dream garden” manual represents only one facet of Byzantine

garden lore and herbalism.Too often, moderns ignore other types besides this religio-mystical

“symbolism” of speci

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Herbs of the Field and Herbs of the Garden in Byzantine Medicinal Pharmacy 179

rst by an obscure

Pamphilus about a century after the original Materia medica appeared, 19 and by the “Syn-

onym Lists” of drugs circulating by the second century, illustrated by the Galenic tract

under this title. 20

The Greek tracts published by Delatte andThomson are ample evidence of an herbalism

among the Byzantines, an herbalism rather far removed from the redolently imaginary gar-

dens of pagan and Christian myth. Such treatises also tell us immediately that doctors,

pharmacologists, herbalists, and farmers not only were very interested (and literate), but also

required information about wild as well as cultivated plants: some were used as medicinals,

others for the manufacture of ointments and perfumes (especially the numerous “oil plants”),

others as food sources on a seasonal basis, still others as condiments, and, of course, as sources

of the species transplanted and carefully tended in the well-known gardens of both the

Byzantine East and medieval Latin West, with similar and carefully cultivated gardens also

characteristic of the Islamic world. 21

Yet even a short survey of this kind of modern study, representing excellent scholarship

and detailed command of the texts and multilingual sources, shows the predominance of an

“ideal garden,” when a scholar considers medicinal plants or potherbs (e.g., J. Stannard, G.

Keil, and C. Opsomer-Halleux in the 1986 Medieval Gardens ). 22 This tendency is widespread

18 Most of the presumed synonyms are set below the text of Dioskorides in the Wellmann edition, with

the clear designation RV, in turn given parallel readings in other sources by the editor as part of the apparatus

criticus.

19 M. Wellmann, “Pamphilos,” Hermes 51 (1916): 1–64.

20 Often cited as “Galen, Glossary, ” the ﬁ rst set of synonym lists in the Galenic corpus appear in C. G.

Kühn, ed., Claudii Galeni Opera omnia, 20 vols. (Leipzig, 1821–33; repr. Hildesheim, 1964–65), 19:62–157. The

second set of exegetical references and synonyms are in the same volume, 721–47; the ﬁ rst of the pair is devoted

to explicating “puzzling” words and de ﬁ nitions of Galen’s ideal, Hippocrates; the second tract (if either is

genuine: some scholars believe both are Renaissance forgeries) provides a set of “quickie” remedies in a kind of

“Substitution List,” not synonyms. Apparently whoever compiled this “Substitution List” was well aware that

many drugs as listed in the Greco-Roman “Galenic” texts were not available locally from time to time, so such

“substitution of drug B for the usual recommendation of drug A” became a model for later Byzantine Greek,

classical Arabic, and medieval Latin glossaries of this sort. Unhappily, many scholars have confused Galen’s

Glossary (best read as a series of explications of earlier medical terminologies, including those from the Hippo-

cratic corpus) with the Substitutions, so that the novitiate may gain a reference from the Glossary, when in

actuality it emerges from Substitutions. Much of this confusion is nicely laid to rest by R. J. Durling, A Dictionary

of Medical Terms in Galen (Leiden, 1993), to which an interested scholar should ﬁ rst resort, especially for the

sometimes more-than-obscure terms of pharmacology.

21 Illustrative are the following: A. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Di ﬀ usion of

Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge, 1983); E. B. MacDougall and R. Ettinghausen, eds., The

Islamic Garden (Washington, D.C., 1976); D. N. Wilber, Persian Gardens and Garden Pavilions, 2d ed. (Washington,

D.C., 1979); E. B. MacDougall, ed., Medieval Gardens (Washington, D.C., 1986). For Muslim Spain, one of the

better studies is L. Bolens, La cuisine andalouse: Un art de vivre, XIe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1990).

22 J. Stannard, “Alimentary and Medicinal Use of Plants,” in MacDougall, Medieval Gardens, 69–92; G. Keil,

“Hortus Sanitatis: Gart der Gesundheit. Gaerde der Sunthede,” ibid., 55–68; and C. Opsomer-Halleux, “The

Medieval Garden and Its Role in Medicine,” ibid., 93–114.

fancifully aromatic plants of the symbolic garden: rather these spare listings show repeated

attempts at precision in nomenclature, attempts forecast quite early by the multilingual

synonyms provided by Dioskorides and later scholiasts, 18 augmented

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180 John Scarborough

ed by the work ofTeresa McLean. 23

One can, to be sure, argue that humankind’s occupation and cultivation of Europe and the

Near East had consumed millennia, and thereby truly feral areas were unusual (unlike the

New World in 1492, which was almost all wild, with the exceptions of certain Amerindian

cultures that

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ourished and passed away long before the arrival of Europeans), so that “wild”

herbs were presumably unimportant in the pharmacal lore of classical antiquity and the

Middle Ages.

Our texts, however, demonstrate vividly that physicians in ancient Greece, the Helle-

nistic world, the Roman Republic, and the successor empires of the Roman and Byzantine

centuries, knew and valued both wild and cultivated plants, employed as drugs; such are fully

attested in the works of many Byzantine physicians and pharmacologists, ranging from

Alexander of Tralles to John Aktouarios. In fact, Byzantine concepts of what was herbal

medicine were fundamental in the teaching of herbal pharmacology in the medical schools

of Renaissance Europe; many of these teaching institutions boasted of their own “teaching

gardens” that incorporated traditionally cultivated potherbs along with “wild herbs” gath-

ered from local countrysides (with information on the curative powers of these plants also

derived from local folklore); soon added to these often beautiful and scrupulously planned

teaching gardens were the ever-increasing numbers of “new and wild” botanicals from the

New World, Africa, and Asia. 24 And as one would expect, culinary arts overlapped pharmacy

in the discussions of plant properties (or “virtues” as they were often termed), so that foods

and foodstu

s became part of herbalism in almost all eras. 25 The Byzantines valued such

expertise, and some recent scholarship has begun to explore how Portuguese, Spanish, and

English, alongside long-term Venetian, trading ventures came to improve the Byzantine

diet. 26

Medical botany is quite prominent in Byzantine medicine, and, as I have indicated

elsewhere, 27 early Byzantine pharmacy occupies a central role in how the doctor treats

disease, in company with how the physician perceives the “properties” (here usually dynameis

in the Greek as one explicates how drugs “work”). Our written texts, from Oribasios to

Paul of Aegina, repeatedly show how the Byzantine philosopher-physicians (and those some-

times known as iatrosophists) reworked, streamlined, augmented, and clari

ed the medical

and pharmacological texts of the Greco-Roman era. Dioskorides’ great Materia medica (ca.

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23 Medieval English Gardens (London, 1981).

24 There is an enormous bibliography on the “introduction” of new species into the pharmacal lore of

Europe in the Renaissance. For a summary and collection of references, see J. Scarborough, “Botany, Pharmacy,

and the Culinary Arts,” in A. C. Crombie and N. Siraisi, eds., The Rational Arts of Living (Northampton, 1987),

161–204.

25 This interplay is well demonstrated in two monographs (among many): R. Howard, La bibliothèque et le

laboratoire de Guy de la Brosse au jardin des plantes à Paris (Geneva, 1983), and W. T. Stern, Botanical Gardens and

Botanical Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Pittsburgh, 1961).

26 Most recently (among the welcome interest in “food history” by classicists and medievalists), one may

consult with pro ﬁ t A. Dalby, “Biscuits from Byzantium,” Siren Feasts (London, 1996), 187–211.

27 J. Scarborough, “Early Byzantine Pharmacology,” DOP 38 (1984): 213–32.

in the specialist literature, and particularly characteristic (perhaps appropriately) of the nu-

merous books on medieval English botanical lore, exempli

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