Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, “The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians”, has long been an inexhaustible source of information for historians of medicine. The ʿUyūn covers some 1,700 years of medical history, starting with Asclepius and his Greek and Roman successors as well as the physicians of India and continuing until Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's own lifetime. In the course of this work, the training, practice and medical writings of 432 physicians are described, many of whom were also active as philosophers – medicine and philosophy were closely connected in ancient thought, and this continued into Islamic times. Among Arabic philosophers, al-Fārābī was one of the few who did not also engage in medical activities.
Countless scholars have consulted the book for their own specific purposes, usually to their great advantage, but only a small minority of them have had the opportunity to read the work as a whole and appreciate in full what Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah set out to do. For a general idea of the work they depended on the overviews provided by other scholars, and thus they also imbibed the views and opinions of these scholars. Prominent among them were August Müller, who published a critical edition of the text in 1882 (Cairo) and 1884 (Königsberg), and Juan Vernet, whose entry on Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam was particularly influential. They basically saw Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah as a compilator who uncritically took over information from older sources, including a lot of irrelevant poetic quotations. Their attitude reflects the views on encyclopaedic works that held sway in the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries and only began to shift later on, when scholars began to realize that the compiler's creative effort lay not in the information itself but in the specific selection, arrangement, and presentation of material which he chose for his book.
This also applies in the case of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah and his ʿUyūn. As the introductory essay of the present edition explains, he did not conceive it as just a reference work, but as a book to be read and enjoyed as a whole, presenting a vast amount of information as well as poetry and anecdotes. In this sense the ʿUyūn clearly stands in the adab tradition, and the present edition and translation justly received the title “a literary history of medicine”. Textually, it is an important advance on previous editions, for by using a new text witness it presents the work in the form which it had reached at the time of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's death in 668/1270.
The first of the five volumes contains introductory essays about the textual history, contents, and background of the ʿUyūn. It also contains the indices to vols 2 and 3, which contain the Arabic text. Vols 4 and 5 present the translation, which is provided with copious notes.
The work was produced by a team of eight specialists led by Emilie Savage-Smith, and amazingly they completed it in six years, a noteworthy feat. The result is a scholarly delight, and this is undoubtedly also due to the fact that the team members, each with their own specialist knowledge, all read each other's contributions and commented on them. Edition, translation and introductory essays are all the product of consummate scholarship. The book is provided with excellent indices, is available in print as well as ebook (searchable as a whole, not by volume only), and published open access. With this publication, a broad audience finally has the opportunity to read Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's work and appreciate it as a whole.
The edition is a substantial advance on that of August Müller, and also on Najjar's attempt at a new critical edition (Cairo 1996–2004), not very positively evaluated by the present editors. The Beirut editions of 1965 and 1998, widely used, were largely based on Müller's work, and scholars will find it enlightening to read in Ignacio Sánchez's introductory essay (no. 3) how they relate to Müller's edition. The essay describes the vast amount of philological groundwork that underpins the present edition, explaining in detail the immensely complicated text transmission. The author's different versions are discussed, and there is a careful analysis of the MSS and earlier editions. Full homage is paid to Müller, who did not yet have access to the MS that might have solved some of the puzzles he had to deal with, i.e. the Istanbul MS (Şehid Ali Paşa MS 1923, dated 773/1372). This MS was copied from an autograph (mubayyaḍa) of version 2 of the ʿUyūn, and on an uncorrected (musawwada) autograph of version 3, a version not included by Müller. It thus forms a core element of the present edition. Tables of the differences between the three versions are added to Sánchez's essay.
This edition will hopefully become the standard basis for research on the ʿUyūn, especially in the Arab world. The fact that it is published open access may assist in this. The same can be said for the translation, which finally makes Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's text available in full to historians of medicine as well as other scholars who do not have access to the Arabic text. It is meticulous as well as readable, and it is a pleasure to see full justice done to the poetry.
Poetry is often a problem in texts such as the ʿUyūn, which are mostly consulted for their factual information. It requires a different kind of expertise, and historians of medicine regularly have looked with some irritation at the many poems included in the ʿUyūn, seeing them as superfluous. The introductory essays make it very clear that instead of being superfluous, the poetry is a core element of the book as it was conceived by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah. The team was fortunate in having Geert Jan van Gelder join their ranks, an undisputed authority on Arabic poetry as well as a gifted translator. Apart from translating the vast amount of poetry in the ʿUyūn (at least a hundred different poets are cited), he also contributed two essays, one on the genre to which the ʿUyūn belongs and on its title, and another on the poetry itself. They are a pleasure to read, not only for their specialist information but also for their more general observations, such as that scholarly integrity demands confessions of ignorance.
Text and translation are amply provided with notes and references to Arabic sources as well as to modern scholarly literature. Both are listed in a substantial bibliography. Of course one cannot expect a complete overview of all the relevant literature here. Not everything could be consulted, and specialists in particular fields may find things to add, put in doubt or change, which is unavoidable. Personally, I think that Usṭāth might have been mentioned as the possible translator of Aristotle's zoology (p. 546, n. 25), since the various editors of the text in the Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus series have all put forward arguments for this. One small detail that I noticed: ḥasharāt are “creeping things”, not “insects”. The category includes hedgehogs, snakes, lizards and such (p. 549, n. 41). It would be petty though to start combing the edition for such minor details. It is an excellent piece of work, and this also applies to the introductory essays (vol. I), which do much to put Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah and his ʿUyūn in their proper perspective.
Emilie Savage-Smith's essay (no. 8) on the practice of medicine as depicted in the ʿUyūn, based as it is on her extensive research, is not only informative but also makes one eager to (re)read her many publications. Just a few fascinating points: what happened inside medieval Islamic hospitals and who made use of them? How could one predict a baby's sex? Should one eat when one has no genuine appetite? Which medical area made the greatest advances on Galen? This was in ophthalmology.
Both Hilloowala, in his biographical essay, and Sánchez, in his essay on the sources of the ʿUyūn, show what Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's view of the physician was: he had to be an all-round intellectual, at home in Greek and Roman, notably Galenic, philosophy and medicine, and with enough erudition to take part in court life and to interact with the top echelons of society. In Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's view, the physician also had considerable status from a religious point of view, for knowing the body is second only to religion. This, I may note, fits into the wider context of Islamic philosophy: nature must be seen as a second Scripture, to be studied with great attention and admiration. Such views are expressed, for instance, by the Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafā’ in “The Case of the Animals against Man”, and Ibn Rushd also emphasizes this outlook in his Faṣl-al-Maqāl.
Ancient Greek medical literature gets ample attention in the ʿUyūn, an important source for Greek texts known in the Arabic tradition, containing material that has not otherwise been preserved. Simon Swain's essay (no. 7) extensively discusses this, showing Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's strong focus on Galen, who received the longest biography in the ʿUyūn. Throughout the ʿUyūn, Hippocratic–Galenic medicine remains Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's focus. Hardly any attention is paid to other forms of medicine. Given the prominence of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah in the history of medicine, I suspect that this is one of the reasons why forms of medieval Islamic medicine (often simply classified as folk medicine) were long neglected by modern scholarship, even though on closer scrutiny they are part of many of the medical works mentioned by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah.
I was particularly taken by Ignacio Sánchez's essay (no. 5) on Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's sources and the art of compilation. It analyses Ibn Abi Uṣaybiʿah's intellectual approach and his use of written sources, an astonishing number of which have been identified. A full list is appended to the chapter. The alphabetical arrangement in the list follows the same order as the general index to Vol. I, but differs from that in the general bibliography, which is a little inconvenient (ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī under ʿAbd in the indices, under Baghdādī in the general bibliography, etc.).
Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah's range of sources is quite wide: libraries, catalogues, letters, archives, historical and bibliographical works, and a substantial amount of adab works and poetry. Plus, of course, the works composed by the physicians themselves, which occasionally contain (auto)biographical information. Sánchez also shows how the ʿUyūn relates to earlier histories of medicine used by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (there are quite a few, not all of which have come down to us) and in what way his own work differs from them. Methodological issues are discussed, such as how Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah acknowledged the origin of his information; his use of secondhand quotations; his unacknowledged borrowings; and much more. As such, the essay is a useful addition to the literature on scholarly practice, such as Franz Rosenthal's The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship.
All in all, the edition is a great contribution to scholarship, to be received with gratitude by a wide range of scholars.
