materia medica

Questions about materia medica

What does materia medica mean?

materia medica means "the science or study of drugs: their preparation and properties and uses and effects".

What is another word for materia medica?

Close synonyms include pharmacology, pharmacological medicine. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is materia medica a common word?

materia medica is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.