Oliver Kahl is a well-known historian of medicine and Graeco-Arabic philologist. His earlier publications in Brill's IPTS series include The Sanskrit, Syriac and Persian Sources in the Comprehensive Book of Rhazes (ITPS Volume 93). His latest study (hereafter UAD) is an Arabic edition, translation, and study of ʿUbaidallāh ibn Buḫtīšūʿ’s commentary on the pseudo-Galenic treatise Book on the Prohibition to Bury the Living (Kitāb Taḥrīm dafn al-aḥyāʾ). Included, too, are English–Arabic and Arabic–English indexes of medical and pharmacological terms, an index of titles of books cited, an index of miscellaneous terms, an index of botanical names, and an Appendix. The Appendix has critical editions of two different recensions of the pseudo-Galenic text, and a Hebrew translation of the pseudo-Galenic treatise by Judah ben Solomon Alharizi (d. 1165–1225). Kahl's latest book will be a valuable reference for historians of medicine, Graeco-Arabists, and Arabo-Islamic intellectual historians.

Kahl begins by reviewing the life of ʿUbaidallāh. He observes that for most of his professional career ʿUbaidallāh lived and practised medicine far from the centres of power in tenth- and eleventh-century Baghdad. The fact that he was remote from the caliph's court, centres of learning, and from patrons appears to have adversely affected the reception of ʿUbaidallāh's writings and medical legacy (UAD 2).

Kahl also assesses the “scientific content” of ʿUbaidallāh's commentary. He notes that while ʿUbaidallāh wrote on apparent death in the form of a commentary, Kahl insists that, in spite of its exegetical format, the commentary propounds a number of original medical doctrines. Kahl claims, in effect, that ʿUbaidallāh's medical vision is modern in the sense that he sought to “liberate the theory and practice of medicine from the conceptual paradigms imposed upon it by philosophy” (UAD 22). Kahl overstates the originality of ʿUbaidallāh's anti-philosophical, anti-speculative sentiments, however. Such lines of thinking are visible in, for example, the Hippocratic On Ancient Medicine. Kahl also exaggerates when he says that ʿUbaidallāh “single-handedly” introduced psychosomatic medicine into the Arabic medical tradition. In fact the reciprocal relationship between the body and soul is a pillar of the ancient Greek medical anthropology.

A long list of august medieval, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and contemporary scholars agree that the Galen did not write The Book on the Prohibition to Bury the Living. Indeed, Kahl records the intriguing suggestion that the Arabic is not even based on a Greek original (p. 11, n. 48). In fact there is internal evidence that corroborates this conclusion. In the midst of speaking about apparent death that is brought about by “heart pain” (wajaʿ al-qalb =? wajaʿ al-fuʾād =? καρδιαλγία) pseudo-Galen says:

Of course other religious sects perform prostrations as a part of worship. The prostration on the forehead, however, recalls the specific posture adopted by Muslims. Unlike at other junctures in the text where common Islamic phrases appear, it is less easy to dismiss this as a later scribe's gloss. At the very least this evidence suggests to me that the suspicions voiced by de Jong and Goeje might have been taken more seriously.

ʿUbaidallāh's treatise is divided into five parts. The first is a long introduction in which ʿUbaidallāh discusses the traditional “headings” (ruʾūs, κεφαλαία) that traditionally accompany commentaries in the Classical Arabic scientific tradition. Thereafter the text divides into four parts. The first deals with apparent death that results from losing consciousness or apoplexy (ighmāʾ, sakta, afūlukhsīya, Kahl translates this as coma, or stroke, p. 27); from heart pain (wajaʿ al-qalb, translated as heart attack, p. 27); from excessive sorrow or joy; or from a “soporific narcotic drugs and deep sleep”. Each class of apparent death is described, Hippocratic and Galenic views surveyed, the aetiology of the condition discussed, the symptoms identified, various forms of therapy prescribed, and compound drug mixtures listed.

Kahl's edition of the text is carefully done. He gives an admirable description of the manuscript, the scribe's orthography, and the text's morphological peculiarities. Kahl has done a great service, too, by not silently “correcting” syntactical “errors” in the text. Recognizing these features not as aberrations but as instances of the historical evolution of Arabic, he preserves them for their “documentary value” (p. 17).

In general the English translation is satisfactory. Kahl's experience with Arabic pharmacopeia is invaluable where recipes for drugs, poultices, and other therapies are listed. There are, however, places where the translation strikes me as problematic. For example, when speaking about the reasons why the body stops moving and the patient appears to be dead, pseduo-Galen says:

Which Kahl translates as:

There are a number of mistakes here. One, “al-quwwa allatī taṣilu ilā l-nafasi”, certainly does not mean “facultative current that is linked to respiration”. Kahl's translation should have linked “min” to the verb, thus: “baṭulati l-ḥarakatu … min faqāri l-ẓahri l-khāmisi”. In other words ʿUbaidallāh designates the location where the patient's body no longer moves, namely, at the fifth (thoracic) vertebra. Further, the addition of “and departs” has no basis in the text; ‘“ceases” has no parallel in the Arabic, nor the added gloss “to flow”; “air-pump” as a translation of nāfikha is wide of the mark; and translating istakanat as shelters is incorrect. The passage should read as follows: