On Medical Matters

4. Our author praises in the preface to the alexipharmaca the inventions concerning the "degrees of powers" by which medicines are potent, even though Dioscorides was a stranger to these inventions.

5. Added to this are unusual words, not customary for Dioscorides to say: for example, hidrotopoia sweat-production, empharynxamenos having gargled, and to halas the salt instead of halon, as Dioscorides always speaks.

B. Concerning the euporista.

The question regarding the euporista easily procurable remedies, of which C. Gesner and Saracenus published two books written to Andromachus, carries an even greater doubt. The aids are repeated from the commentaries on materia medica and the alexipharmaca themselves, but the plants or medicines are often distinguished by other names. Since neither the later Greeks nor the ancient interpreters know that work, and no other manuscripts are known besides the one from Augsburg—which Moibanus, and after his death, C. Gesner, caused to be printed—the suspicion injected cannot be easily dispelled.

I cannot help but bring forward a memorable testimony of the age in which this treatise seems to have been written. Having described the plant which he calls chamaikera-son ground-cherry, which already seemed to C. Gesner to be the Convallaria majalis Lily of the Valley, he compares the scent of its flowers to musk. I am convinced that both Moses of Chorene, the Armenian of the 5th century, and Cosmas Indicopleustes of the 6th century, were the first to make mention of musk.

To these is added (Book II, ch. 63) the trace of the weight exagion, which, equaling four scruples, was used in gold coins after the age of Constantine the Great, and passed late to the physicians, so that Io. Actuarius and Nic. Myrepsicus (12th and 13th centuries) use it especially.