A Page from the Dioscurides Neapolitanus, Sixth or Seventh Century
The Dioscurides Neapolitanus, an illustrated copy of Dioscorides' De materia medica made in the sixth or seventh century. The text was compiled under Nero and remained the working pharmacopoeia of European medicine for well over a thousand years.
Monastic medicine was not invented in the cloister; it was inherited, copied and applied there. Houses kept herb gardens laid out against texts like this one, ran infirmaries under the Rule's instruction that the sick be served before all others, and produced the copies without which the ancient pharmacology would not have survived at all. What the monasteries added was continuity and record-keeping rather than discovery. See healing, innovation and knowledge in medieval monasteries.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
