doi:10.1017/S1062798708000203 Printed in the United Kingdom Islamic Pharmacology and Pharmacy in the Latin West: An Approach to

During the final decade of the 15th century and the first half of the 16th century, there were moves to harmonize pharmaceutical therapy in a number of areas of the Mediterranean and Central Europe. The most evident consequence was the appearance of books of compilations of simple and compound remedies specially selected from a wide range of earlier pharmacological literature. These compilations were set up as ‘standards ’ by the authorities concerned with public health in many states. In theory, apothecaries were obliged to follow these ‘official ’ instructions for preparing and dispensing drugs in order to ensure that the medicines prescribed by physicians were correctly made up and safe. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the persistence of Arabic drugs and recipes through the content of three of these handbooks between 1499 and 1618. Most of our Western medical heritage, written in either Arabic or Hebrew, was translated into Latin for the first time in Toledo, as well as in the southern Italian area of Salerno. It was indeed thanks to these translations that Islamic pharma-cology was able to keep Greek traditions of drugs and drug-lore alive in the Lati