The work of the Italian physician and humanist Ermolao Barbaro was published in 1516, 23 years after his death. Poliziano wrote to Ermalao Barbaro, forwarding a manuscript of the 1st-century pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides, asking him to send it back "annotated by that very learned hand of yours, thus lending the volume additional value and authority." Barbaro was professor of the University of Padua in 1477 and translated many texts from Greek to Latin.
He sought to avoid mistakes by gathering as many manuscripts as he could for checking the texts. He claimed to have corrected 5000 mistakes between two editions of Pliny the Elders Naturalis historia, a work he found very similar to Materia Medica', for which he used at least two editions as well.
The result of Barbaros effort occupied no fewer than 58 pages printed in three columns of about 50 entries each. The work provides a key to over 9,000 items; all references were to pages. This was the first annotated Latin translation of Dioscorides Materia Medica, and so Barbaro became the earliest of the Renaissance translators of Dioscorides, a practice that saw its golden age in the 16th century. Barbaro's work was later corrected by Giovanni-Battista.