From the Sbath collection: the most important Arabic ophthalmology manual

Ibn Isa al-Kahal, Sharafadin Ali. Tadhkirat al-Kahalin [Memorandum for Oculists].

€ 165.000,00

The standard handbook of ophthalmology in Arabic medicine, preserved here in a complete Levantine doctor's copy from the famous collection of Paul Sbath.

Written by the Baghdad eye physician Ali ibn Isa al Kahhal (known in Latin Europe as Jesu Haly or Jesu Oculist), this was the most widely used Arabic manual on diseases of the eye: a practical, clinically-minded book that explained ailments as they presented themself to the practitioner, their names, causes, and treatments. The appeal of the text lies in its structure: it opens with the anatomy of the eye, then proceeds to the visible and finally to the hidden diseases; in each chapter the author sets out roots and remedies, and the work concludes with an alphabetical glossary of drugs and compounds. From the 11th century CE it circulated throughout the Islamic world, and from the 12th century onward it was translated into Latin and adopted in Europe as a principal authority on ophthalmology, shaping medical teaching and practice for centuries.

This copy is especially attractive for what it reveals about continuing medical practice in the late Ottoman Levant: it preserves ownership and gift inscriptions for an oculist named Elyass Kahal, and is signed by the physician-scribe Ahmad ibn Shaykh Mustafa al Khlassi (d. 1829). Thus, this was a book copied, transferred, and used among named practitioners, in a region where medicine and confessional communities were closely intertwined. Paul Sbath's ownership record adds a final layer of history. Sbath (1887-1945), a Syrian Catholic priest from Aleppo, assembled a private library of about 1,325 manuscripts, mainly Arabic and Syriac, with notable strengths in Eastern Christian theology and history, but also in scientific and medical texts such as the present work. Between 1913 and 1927 Sbath negotiated at length with Cardinal Eugene Tisserant of the Vatican Library to eventually sell 775 manuscripts to the Vatican, a transaction marked by disputes over dating, cataloguing, and price, and by a deeper disagreement about what was really being acquired. In this light, a manuscript that is explicitly described in Sbath's catalogue is more than a medical text: it is also a witness to one of the best-documented modern attempts to preserve, define, and legitimise an eastern Mediterranean manuscript library under conditions of political uncertainty.