The catalogue of medical manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine in the USA, prepared by Professor Savage-Smith, is one of the most important online resources available to the historian of medicine. Now Professor Savage-Smith has bestowed upon us another rich repository of information, a catalogue of over two-hundred Arabic-language medical manuscripts held by the Bodleian Library. The catalogue is arranged topically rather than by codices. Within each topic, the manuscripts are ordered chronologically. A set of concordances, located at the end as Appendixes I–III, group the texts by manuscript, author, and dated manuscript.
Topics covered are: translations, general manuals, medical poetry, medical monographs (aphorisms, ophthalmology, sexual hygiene, phlebotomy, and more), therapeutics, dietetics, pharmaceutics, “medicine of the prophet”, plague tracts, and “modern palimpsests”. Thorough indexing is an absolute necessity in a work of this sort, and this volume meets all expectations. There are indexes of: titles; copyists; owners, donors, and vendors; persons and treatises cited; and a general index. Forty-five well-chosen colour plates are included and beautifully reproduced.
The entries are all fully detailed, first displaying the title and author and giving a good account of the contents, then the beginning and end of each treatise, followed by a physical description of the manuscript, marginalia (good to see such attention paid to this valuable source!), volume contents (usually a reference to the first concordance), binding, provenance and references (locations of other copies, published accounts, editions). Generous extracts are often provided. (Note the full identification of the plants illustrated in books three and four of Dioscorides’ Materia Medica, exhibited on pp. 46–64.) Also of note are several corrections to Manfred Ullmann's Der Medizin in Islam, certainly the most authoritative handbook available.
Good manuscript catalogues go beyond technical details of paper, binding, provenance, and so forth, exhibiting new and substantial information. Among the numerous contributions of this volume are a discussion of the different versions of Ibn Sallūm's Paracelsan “chemical medicine” (pp. 559–61) and the piecing together of Ibn al-Nafīs’ comprehensive work al-Shāmil (pp. 338–9).
The erudition displayed in this catalogue is very impressive; this reviewer learned for the first time about many obscure, often rather old but still valuable publications. Nonetheless, there are some inevitable omissions. One significant example is entry no. 35, al-Risālah al-Hārunīyah by Masīḥ al-Dimashqī. Savage-Smith writes: “A number of manuscript copies of the entire work are extant, but no study has been undertaken of the treatise…”. In fact, Suzanne Gigandet has published a book-length study, including an edition and French translation: Masīḥ b. Ḥakam al-Dimašqī, Médicin damascain du IIIe h./IXe siècle (Damascus: Institut Franҫais d'Études arabes de Damas, 2001). The present writer has found additional fragments and recipes attributed to this individual, and has also suggested that he belonged to the Isawiyya; if true, his book is the only extant writing by a member of this sect (see Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Masīḥ b. Ḥakam, a Jewish–Christian (?) physician of the early ninth century”, Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism 4, 2004, 283–92).
More surprising is the labelling of Abū al-Faraj Ibn al-Ṭayyib as “unidentified” (p. 410). He is, of course, the well-known Christian physician, philosopher and theologian who worked in Baghdad (d. 1043). He has an entry in the Encyclopedia of Islam, and a number of his works have been published. The description of the tract on the siwāk ought to have referred to Gerrit Bos and Vardit Rispler-Chaim, whom Savage-Smith included in her entry on this tool for dental hygiene in her online catalogue of the National Library of Medicine: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/diet3.html
Although all of the texts described are in the Arabic language, not all are written in Arabic script: quite a few are written in the Hebrew alphabet. These are not limited to writings by Jewish authors; Kitāb al-Kāfī by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (colophon reproduced in plate X), for example, is transcribed into Hebrew letters. Attention should be called in particular to Antidotarium Nicolai (entry 34*), an influential Latin treatise on compound remedies, which exists in many Hebrew manuscripts, and several Arabic ones. These are translations from Latin; all extant Arabic versions are in Hebrew script! Other texts are written in Karshuni. Yet with the exception of entry 78C, where some words are printed out in Syriac, the extracts in the catalogue are all transcribed back into the Arabic alphabet. For the list of remedies taken from Nicolas, printed on pages 125–30, Savage-Smith has added to the transcribed Arabic-letter name a Hebrew transliteration in Arial Unicode. This policy is a throwback to the scholarly practice of one-hundred years ago. It may be a necessary convenience for those unable to read anything that is not in the Arabic alphabet, but it comes at the expense of the autonomy of Hebrew and Syriac letters. In any event, it is certainly wrong to dub as “original” an Arabic-letter text by Maimonides. A number of autographed medical fragments of Maimonides have been found in the Cairo Genizah, and they are in Hebrew letters.
The volume has been proofread very carefully. There is, however, one recurring typographical error – the result, I assume, of using a copy and paste function in the word-processor, so that the same error appears more than once: F. Rosenthal's studies are collected in F. Rosenthal, obviously, not R. Rosenthal, Science and Medicine in Islam (pp. 9, 18).
