Influential Arabic handbook for medical students

Ibn al-Nafis al-Qarashi, Ala'addin Abu 'l Hasan Ali / Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Kitab al-Mujaz fi al-Tibb [A Summary of Medicine].

€ 8.500,00

Featuring an uncommon medical diagram, this popular and influential medieval Arabic handbook for medical students was composed by the great Damascus anatomist Ibn al-Nafis (1210-88); an illustration on the lower half of one leaf, executed in red and black ink, shows anatomical details of the head and eyes, including different layers of the skull and parts of the brain, as well as the anatomy of the human eye and ear. The ears are shown to be connected to the brain, and the eyes likewise, with the optic nerves clearly displayed in roughly their correct placement, including the intersection point.

The text was long considered a commentary on Avicenna. However is now viewed by scholarship as an original work which also discusses Avicenna's ideas, and thus as "an independent book meant to be a handbook for medical students and practitioners, not as an epitome of Kitab Al-Qanun of Ibn Sina as thought by recent historians" (Abdel-Halim, 2008). One of the author's most widely received works, it provides a useful sum of medical knowledge to aspiring physicians of the medieval and early modern periods alike. It was still being copied centuries on from the death of Ibn al-Nafis, who is famous for first describing the pulmonary blood circulation, thereby anticipating by many centuries the efforts of William Harvey.