His most important contribution was in writing the Compendium of Materia Medica which he took 27 years to complete. In this medical text features 1,892 entries, detailing more than 1,800 drugs or items believed to have medicinal properties (like plants, animals and minerals), 1,100 illustrations and 11,000 prescriptions.
Although not all of its information is scientifically correct (some have been proven to be erroneous due to the contemporary limited scientific and technical knowledge of those times), it still remains as a premier reference work for herbal medicines, has been translated into more than 20 languages and contains information valuable to a wide variety of subjects such as botany, zoology, mineralogy and metallurgy.
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