This materia medica a book of collected knowledge about medicines and their properties was originally written in Persian by Noureddeen Mohammed Abdullah al-Shirazi (fl.1625 40), physician to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, to whom it was dedicated. This 1793 publication contains entries in Persian, Arabic and Hindi, with English translations by Francis Gladwin (1744 1812), an employee of the East India Company and professor of Persian at Fort William College. The work begins by giving traditional Arabic evaluations of each type of medicine in terms of its power on a scale of 1 to 4, before...