Medicine and healing. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, annual proceedings 1990

subject of three papers (IV, IX, XIII) which deal with the Alphabetical Dioscorides (the Latin translation which superseded the earliest Latin version), the even more popular PseudoDioscoridean Ex herbis femininis (sixth century), with a listing of its 71 herbal entries, and Byzantine commentaries post-dating the celebrated Anicia Juliana of AD 512 which offer more modest but qualitatively superior medical and botanical scholia to those on the Latin text of the De materia medica. Individual treatises studied are the Medicinae ex oleribus et pomis of the thirdcentury Roman soldier-writer Quintus Gargilius Martialis (X) and the pseudo-Hippocratic Dynamidia (sixth century) covering the dietary and medicinal properties of 78 foodstuffs (listed in a table by Riddle) and based in part on Hippocrates' Peri diaitis Bk II and Gargilius Martialis. Interesting parallels between the understanding of the therapeutic properties of certain drugs in Antiquity/Middle Ages and in this century are drawn in two studies (XII, XIV including a table of 257 drugs from the Hippocratic Corpus) and the question of pragmatic versus theoretical knowledge considered there also forms the subject of a comprehensive paper dealing with the Middle Ages (VI). The scientific contribution of three previously neglected sixteenth-century figures are considered in an intriguing essay (VII). To make this welcome collection even more useful, Professor Riddle has supplied an impressive index of manuscripts (over 200) and an admirably detailed index of terms.