The father of Islamic anatomical science

Mansur ibn Ilyas. Tashrih-i Mansuri [Mansur's Anatomy].

€ 45,000.00

The famous and fabulously illustrated book of anatomy by Mansur ibn Ilyas, featuring six large medical diagrams of humans. Each diagram shows a different aspect of the human anatomy, such as the digestive tract, the female reproductive system, the ocular nerves and spinal column, and the skeleton; important aspects of these anatomies (in one case the ribs, in another the intestines) are picked out in gold, and nerves and blood vessels are traced in green and orange.

Mansur was a physician from Shiraz at the height of the Timurid Empire, and dedicated this medical work to the grandson of Tamerlane. In Mansur's time, medical diagrams were all but unheard of, especially in Muslim manuscripts. Debate continues among scholars over whether he was truly the first Muslim physician to create an illustrated anatomy, but the impact and novelty of his effort was indisputable, especially his relatively accurate depiction of pregnancy. The diagrams in a manuscript of "Tashrih-i Mansuri" are considered as integral to the work as the text itself, and were thus preserved in the manuscript tradition for hundreds of years.

Collected alongside Mansur's magnum opus is a fascinating collection of shorter medical works, including "Dar Mazar Tarakib-i Afyun" ("On the harms of opioid compounds"), Mawlana Yusufi's "Tibb-i Yusufi" (here under the variant title "Jami' al-fava'id"), "Risalah Dar Marifat-i Hamiyat" ("A treatise on fevers") by an anonymous author, and a dictionary of medical terms.