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The study focuses on the development of pharmacopoeas during the early, modern time. First, the >Nouvo Receptario< of 1499 came out in Florence as the first printed pharmacopoea of a north-Italian town, edited by the guild of medicines and apothecaries. Following trading routes the idea of >pharmacopoea< arrived in Nuremberg, where the counsil of the town asked the humanist Valerius Cordus to prepare such a book. Printed in 1546, it quickly became the standard in preparing medicines for other towns in southern Germany. At Augsburg, a wealthy and powerful town, the physicians wrote their own pharmacopoea which was printed in 1564. The comparison of the three pharmacopoeas shows that its printing depended on the social structure and the financial aspects of each town. But even if the apothecaries, the doctors or the mayors were trained in the humanistic tradition, the materia medica still continued in the arabic tradition, i.e. the old drugs and preparations remained in these pharmacopoeas, probably for financial reasons.