Physicians in the West were still bleeding patients to treat heart disease and many other conditions when a Persian physician and pharmacist wrote a medical text that would be considered forward-thinking by today’s standards. Mohammad Hossein Aghili Alavi Khorasani’s book examines the medicinal properties of almost two thousand drugs of natural origin (animal, mineral, plant). Written in 1772, it describes topical preparations that include the leaves, bark and flowers of the