A Literary History of Medicine: The 'Uyun al-anba' fi tabaqat al-atibba' of Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah.

• Author: Hirschler, Konrad

A Literary History of Medicine: The 'Uyun al-anba' fi tabaqat al-atibba' of Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah. Edited and translated by EMILIE SAVAGE-SMITH, SIMON SWAIN, and GEERT JAN VAN GELDER. Handbuch fur Orientalistik, 1: The Near and Middle East, vol. 134. 5 vols. Leiden: BRILL, 2020. $865. Open access: https://scholarlyeditions.brill.coin/lhom/.

In thirteenth-century Damascus the physician Ibn Abl Usaybi'a (d. 668/1269f.) penned a veritable global history of medicine, his well-known dictionary of famous (and not so famous) physicians. As the numerous extant manuscripts attest, 'Uyun al-anba' fi tabaqat al-alibba' (The best accounts of the classes of physicians) was highly popular among Arabic-reading audiences. Its first translation into Latin was produced in the early eighteenth century and since then the text has been translated in full or in part into numerous languages. In some sense, his global history of medicine itself has become a global phenomenon. The enduring popularity of this work is not very surprising as its author set out to write nothing but a complete history of medicine from the mythological beginnings (Asclepius) via Greece, Rome, and India down to his present time. In consequence, references to his work are a stock feature for any study on the history of medicine and also for many studies on Middle Eastern history in the Ayyubid and early Mamluk eras.

Yet despite its fame the text shared the fate of so many other texts that have a central position for Middle Eastern history--it is a fascinating and, in many ways, crucial text, but its historical importance stands in glaring contrast to the highly problematic, incomplete, and substandard print editions that we tend to use. Until now, the 1884 edition of August Muller (1848-1892) has remained the standard edition for any academic work. Miiller deserves full credit for what was a major achievement at his time, but the edition lacks crucial manuscripts (which were not known then) and contains various mistakes (which are particularly numerous because of botched typesetting). The subsequent "editions" that appeared in the Middle East (in particular by Nizar Rida, Beirut 1965, and Muhammad Basil 'Uyun al-Sud, Beirut 1998) were in fact nothing but slightly altered reprints where the main difference was simply a new typeface. 'Amir al-Najjar published a new edition (Cairo 1996-2004) that corrected many of the mistakes in the Miiller edition, but it was itself highly problematic on...