ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of Falloppia’s wide-range interests in materia medica. He started his academic career with lectures on medicinal plants, but his most original contributions dealt with the metals, minerals, and soils that were found in the earth and/or came to the surface in thermal springs. He combined his interest in the medicinal qualities of these substances with more general natural-philosophical considerations about their genesis. In conclusion, the chapter presents Falloppia as a major representative of empirical methods in Renaissance pharmacology. He used a distillation apparatus in order to identify the different mineral substances that explained the therapeutic effects of different mineral waters. And he stressed the importance of the specific, supraelementary powers of many medicines, which resulted from their total substance rather than from the primary qualities and could be assessed only by observing the effects on the human body.
