Crateuas (physician)


Crateuas or Cratevas, nicknamed the Rhizotomist was a Greek doctor and pharmacologist who lived around 100 BC.
. Krateuas is in the top left hand corner next to Galen.

Life and works

Crateuas was the personal physician of Mithridates VI of Pontus. He wrote a three-part Herbal in which he described the medicinal properties of plants. He produced a second, popular edition with colour images, in which the plants were arranged in alphabetical order. This is the first known Herbal to have included images of the plants and was the model for very many later works of the same sort. To date, only two papyrus fragments of this work are known. Pliny the Elder records that Crateuas painted images of the plants and listed their effects below the images.
Crateuas' book was one of the main sources for Pedanius Dioscorides. In some of the tables of the "Vienna Dioscurides", the images are captioned by short texts beginning with the name of Crateuas. An image taken from Crateuas is found in Table 3 of the Vienna Dioscurides.
In the 16th century, an illustrated manuscript of Crateuas is said to have still existed in Constantinople. Luigi Anguillara claimed to have used this manuscript in drawing up his 1561 work, Semplici. However, was able to prove that a Latin version of Dioscurides was the source of Anguillara's work. Wellmenn also suggested that a large number of the plant images in the Vienna Dioscurides were copied from manuscripts of Crateuas dating to the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD. Charles Singer's studies supported this suggestion.

Honorific Taxon

named the genus Crateva of the plant family Capparaceae in honour of Crateuas