PHARMACEUTICS AND ALCHEMY

• In the field of materia medica and its applications, Islamic writers surpassed their earlier models because of their broader geographic horizons brought them into contact with drugs unknown to earlier peoples, such as camphor, musk, sal ammoniac, and senna. In later Arabic works, medicines were used that came from as far as China, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, southern India, and Africa.
• Initially based upon the approximately 500 substances described in the 1st century AD by Dioscorides in his Greek treatise on materia medica.
• Medical encyclopedias usually had one chapter on materia medica and another on recipes for compound remedies
• The topic of poisons was of great interest in both antiquity and the medieval world and it also generated its own literature.
• Many of the techniques employed in drug production were also part of the realm of alchemy.
• The Arabic word al-kimiya, from which we derive the word alchemy, was used for both chemistry and alchemy, and no clear distinction was made between the two activities.
• As the equipment and processes of alchemy developed -- with its methods of evaporation, filtration, sublimation, crystallization, and distillation -- they came to influence pharmacy and medical chemistry.