Talk:De Materia Medica

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I wound up here after noting the link on the De materia medica page in Wikipedia. The previous comment is from 2010, over a decade ago, and nearly all of the links here (in the discussion) and on the page itself are no longer active. Importantly, the links to original source scans are gone. Claytonllibrar (talk) 13:35, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

We need something...

This is admittedly a rather peculiar proposal: to translate a German translation of Dioscorides into English. The rationale is as follows:

• De Materia Medica is one of the most fundamental works of Western medical history. It's public domain, so we need it on Wikisource
• Reportedly the only English translation that may soon enter the public domain (Goodyer) is of low quality and includes chapters not in the Greek text.[1]
• There is a good Greek version (Wellman) but neither I nor someone else [2] could find it on the Web. (The 1829 Greek version with Latin commentary by Curtius Sprengel is available for free download [3]) Besides, the German seems challenge enough...
• By using the relatively recent (1902) German version, we have access to a [somewhat...] usable set of species names. It is true that whole scientific papers have been written about the identity of individual species in this work, and no doubt the last century has seen a few changes. But by setting down a complete public domain work, we establish a starting point. If an editor then adds a note mentioning that Beck's translation varies for a particular herb, that is scholarly commentary rather than piracy.

The document I'd like to see generated should strive to become "generic" Dioscorides, in the sense that it should feel free to comment on differences between other versions. Notably, I think it would be instructive to incorporate what few stray photographs have been released from older copies of the manuscript, as readers are generally going to be interested in what was known a millennium or two ago rather than in 1902 when the translation was made.

As a matter of practicality (it is quite a long work and I'm not sure if others on Wikisource are interested...), I think we should tolerate some mixture of German and English sections for some time, especially in the main text, so that new editors can readily get to work translating particular sections as they become interested in them. Mike Serfas (talk) 06:05, 12 February 2010 (UTC)