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Results for materia medica
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[New Latin māteria medica (translation of Greek hulē iātrikē) : Latin māteria, material + Latin medica, feminine of medicus, medical.]
The study of drugs and other substances used in medicine, their origins, preparation, uses, and effects.
The study of materials used as medicine. It used to be a subject in veterinary curricula and dealt mostly with the physical and chemical characteristics of the medicinal substances. As a science it has now been largely superseded by pharmacology.
medical material
Materia medica is a Latin medical term for the body of collected knowledge about the therapeutic properties of any substance used for healing. Nowadays we would call these drugs. In Latin, the term literally means "medical matters".
The term was used from the period of the Roman Empire until the twentieth century, but has now been generally replaced in medical education contexts by pharmacology.
One of the best-known early uses of the term was in the title of a work by the Greek physician Dioscorides in the first century A.D., entitled de materia medica libri quinque (concerning medical matter in five volumes). This famous commentary covered about 600 plant drugs plus a number of therapeutically useful animal and mineral products.
In the early twentieth century, the body of knowledge termed materia medica was transformed by the methods and knowledge of medicinal chemistry into the science of pharmacology.
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Dental Dictionary. Mosby's Dental Dictionary. Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Veterinary Dictionary. Saunders Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary 3rd Edition. Copyright © 2007 by D.C. Blood, V.P. Studdert and C.C. Gay, Elsevier. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Latin Phrase. © 1999-2008 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Materia medica". Read more |
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