Adwiya (drugs and materia medica in Islamic pharmacology)

Adwiya, the plural of dawa, means every substance that affects the constitution of the human body, whether used as a remedy or as a poison. Muslim pharmacology rested on Greek learning and took in Persian, Syriac and Indian names.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), signed H. A. R. Gibb, says that following Greek ideas, Muslim pharmacologists distinguished simple drugs (adwiya mufrada) from compound drugs (adwiya murakkaba), and divided the drugs by origin into vegetable, animal and mineral. Muslim pharmacology depends on Greek learning, from the time the caliph al-Mansur summoned the chief physician of the Jundishapur hospital in 148/765. Galen, Dioscorides, Oribasius and Paul of Aegina reached the Arabs through Syriac translations, which Hunayn b. Ishaq and his circle then rendered into Arabic. Because Dioscorides held that every plant had some medicinal virtue, pharmacological writers also included botanical descriptions. ¹

The Arabic lists of names were swelled by Arabic, Iranian, Greek and Indian terms, which caused serious confusion, and many works were written to fix their meanings. About a hundred Arab authors on materia medica are known from the bibliographies, and about thirty survive. Al-Biruni's al-Saydana fi 'l-tibb, left unfinished with some 720 articles, is the most important synonym work of the East. In Spain the study was stimulated by the revised Dioscorides of the 10th century, and the great compilation of Ibn al-Baytar (d. 646/1248) gathered material from about 150 earlier authors. The article also lists the illustrated herbals and the Spanish and Maghribi writers on simples. ²