The use of minerals, plants and burnt materials in ancient medicine: Approaches to working recipes in John the Physician's Therapeutics from late 13th century Cyprus

We have undertaken an innovative multidisciplinary approach towards the identification of pharmaceutical ingredients used in Byzantine Greece, with a particular focus on popular medicine in late 13th century Cyprus. Our case study is based on one source, John the Physician's Therapeutics (JC), along with a comparative study of other scholarly and non-scholarly texts. Our main goal was to develop a new, documented and transferable methodology to address a key, unresolved challenge when working with such texts, namely our ability to identify with confidence the individual ingredients, primarily plants, minerals and burnt materials, cited. This is an essential step in analysis of ancient pharmacy. Practical research focused on the understudied burnt substances and minerals that were added to medication. Ingredients identified have been mapped onto their current pharmaceutical uses thus exploring potential interest to pharmacological research. The main approaches in relation to minerals and burnt substances include a comparison between JC and the ancient Greek handbook, De Materia Medica, written by Pedanius Dioscorides to see if there are likely candidates for materials; a consideration of the potential minerals available from Cyprus; the significance of mineral elements in modern medicine and a reconstruction of some of the recipes suggested by JC. In this paper we describe a series of experiments reconstructing the use of burnt material in the recipes and consider their potential pharmaceutical use and potential efficacy. We conclude that at least some of the recipes had some potential practical medicinal value.