Tag: Ibn Abi Usaibia

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In to town, to hand back Vermaseren’s Mithras: the secret god.  No sign yet of two British Library loans of other Mithras books.  I was relieved to discover that the local library was open, as I had feared that it might not be — there is a public sector workers strike today.

I am still reading Grant’s book on Greek and Roman authors, one entry at a time.  I am learning things from it, that’s for sure.

Not everything in such books is sound.  In the entry for Athanasius, for instance, he refers to the existence of a possible autograph letter of Athanasius to the monk Paphnutius.  It seems that this was published in 1924 by H. I. Bell in Jews and Christians in Egypt, and bears the shelfmark Papyrus London 1929.  But a Google search revealed that Tim Barnes, for instance, in his Constantius and Athanasius, considered that there was no evidence that the “Athanasius” of this letter was the same as the famous archbishop.  The letter was found together with others which suggested that Paphnutius may have been a Meletian.  It is slightly frustrating that I was unable to locate Bell’s work online.

A chance visit to Wikipedia yesterday revealed another poor soul there being bullied and harassed there by a gang of other users, and being treated with little respect or mercy.  (I didn’t agree with his edits, but I could see what was being done to him).  The ploy seemed to be to bully him until he left, and then, if he returned under another name, block him for “sock puppeting”.  I suspect that bullying is endemic in Wikipedia, in truth, and that it is concealed merely because Google doesn’t make it easily possible to search the endless pages in which it is taking place.  It’s not a safe place to visit, and it needs to be placed under proper management, and scrutiny.

Meanwhile the task of OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia grinds on.  I’ve now passed page 700; only another 250 pages to go!  The low light conditions at this time of year, and the short days, leave me feeling very sleepy much of the time, and it’s not that easy to gather the energy to buckle down and do things.

So … what shall I do this afternoon?

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Still plodding on with Ibn Abi Usaibia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The process of OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians is continuing, and the proofing has reached page 600.  This is something of a milestone, in that this leaves only one more “chunk” — the portion from 601-946, which the translators thought of as “book 4” (although they did not divide the first 600 pages into books).

I’ve been noticing changes in the way the text is translated.  In the last few pages, the translator has started to reference the authors named with a footnote linking to Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur.  This is welcome in a way, but of course indicates a change in approach.

A much less welcome change is that, from Ibn Sina onwards, the translator is not bothering to translate the names of many of the works written by the authors listed, leaving them in a transliteration of the Arabic.  This is a really serious defect, and one that may require attention.  It will be annoying if, in order to make this useful to the rest of us, I have to hire an Arabist to translate these bits of text.

Likewise there are embedded chunks of verse, mostly omitted by the translator.  I feel less compunction here — it is unlikely that most of  these will give us anything.

Kopf, the translator, must have been under a rather strange brief when making the translation.  He has represented all the long vowels and the sub-linear dots, albeit doing so with his typewriter must have been painful, and he doesn’t always catch every one.  But for whom would it be useful to write “Allāh” rather than “Allah”?  Only, surely, to those who could read Arabic anyway?  I can’t help feeling that he shouldn’t have indicated either.  In English we don’t use these things.

My own approach in my transcription is to represent the long vowels, but not the sub-linear dots.  In many cases the characters with the latter are simply not present in the common fonts anyway, as I have found while proofing.  I’d like to have them, of course; but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

I hope that all these long vowels won’t mean that searches in Google and Bing don’t find important matches, tho.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still chopping away at Ibn Abi Usaibia, and I’m on p.463 now.  <sfx:groan>  I’m almost sure this was less hard work ten years ago.  Of course the OCR software wasn’t as good back then.  Maybe it’s just my imagination.  I shall have some time over the next couple of weeks to make real progress with this, tho — a training course that I had booked for the week after next is not going to run.  This leaves me at a loose end, suddenly and unexpectedly. 

The first two pages of the translation of Methodius, De lepra have come through and I think that they are basically sound.  The translator actually translated the entirety of the page and laid it out in Word, notes and apparatus and all, which was rather impressive.  At the moment we’re discussing what to do with all of Bonwetsch’s notes: first a set of biblical and other references, and then an apparatus.  It looks as if we’ll just translate a few of the major notes where these would affect the meaning.

But I haven’t managed to pay for any of it yet.  Indeed I’m still learning how www.peopleperhour.com’s website works.  But the system requires a large deposit, which I have paid.  Thankfully this can be done from Paypal, so your purchases of CDROM’s etc can be used to fund the new work directly.   I have no strong feelings either way, so far, about whether www.peopleperhour.com is a good place to get work done.  I suppose that means that it is basically going well.

One interesting problem is that, while the translator knows his German, he isn’t familiar with the bible, or the ecclesiastical-speak that we find in so many patristic works.  One sentence confused him rather seriously, because he didn’t recognise the reference to the parable of the mustard seed.

Nor could this be expected, necessarily — a general translator probably specialises in contemporary documents where everyone is thinking in the same culture-pattern, whatever language they are writing those common thoughts in.  We, on the other hand, are accustomed to work which is honeycombed with biblical language and ideas. 

But it’s a warning to us all, in a way.  Material that we think is clear and obvious does in fact involve a jargon, and some unusual ways of assembling sentences and referring out to the biblical text.

I wish Bonwetsch had written in French.  I could probably have done the whole text myself in a day or two.  But German always hurts, when I have to translate it.  I suppose it just means that I need to read much more stuff in German, and get used to it, in the way I did for French.  But when would I get the time?

UPDATE: 9pm, I’ve just completed p.500, and it’s now time to back up my PC for the weekend!

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Ibn Abi Usaibia update

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I may be on holiday this week, but the sky is leaden grey, and has been so for a week, apart from a few hours yesterday.  So I’m working on OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians.

I’ve reached page 353, where begins the entry on Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the great translator of Greek medical works into Arabic.  I hope this will be interesting.

In truth I am relieved to reach this point.  The last 50 pages have been all about the physicians of the early Abbasid period; venal, money-grubbing, treacherous, self-important and — one and all — evidently incompetent.  Reading about the palace intrigues in which all took part has been tedious enough. 

The interesting thing is that, because most of them had no medical skill, they placed their patient in danger.  They all had the same patient too — the Caliph — who alone had the money to hire them.  So the Abbassid ruler who hired them was at more danger than any of his subjects!

UPDATE: I have just reached p.400 of Ibn Abi Usaibia. 

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Ibn Abi Usaibia in French in the Journal Asiatique

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent has written and let me know that French translations exist of chunks of Ibn Abi Usaibia’s History of Physicians.  They were done by Sanguinetti in the Journal Asiatique, with the chunks starting in 1854.  I’ve seen five bits so far.  The first chunk is here (1854, series 5, tome 3, p.230 f.), and includes a useful biography of Ibn Abi Usaibia.  The second part is here (1854, series 5, tome 4, p.177 f.), mostly from the second chapter of the book, about Asculapius.   The third part is here (1855, series 5, tome 5, p.401 f.), extracts from chapter 7.  Unfortunately the BNF does not have 1855 series 5, tome 6 online, which must contain the fourth part — tome 7 does not contain it. [Update: it’s here at Google books, p.129]  The fifth part is here (1856, series 5, tome 8, p.175 f.), extracts from chapter 4 (Hippocrates).

That seems to be all, as the next tome (9) contains an article also by Sanguinetti, on p.392, headed Biographical notices of various physicians, taken from an Arabic work by Assafedy: French translation with notes.

All this material is useful to have.   I thought that I would translate chunks of Sanguinetti’s introduction, which also includes a biography of Ibn Abi Usaibia.  Note that I have not attempted to change his transcription of Arabic names from the older French style into those used today.

The purpose that I had in view, in the present work, is to contribute to make known a work whose complete publication would render much service to all those who are busy with the history of sciences in general, and particularly to those who study the history of medicine and philosophy.  The fragment that follows is composed of the preface of the Arab author, then the first chapter of the work, which deals with the origin of medicine.  In his introduction Ibn Abi Usaibia develops the subjects which he intends to include in his book.  He then indicates the plan and mentions the content. I will refrain from dwelling on these different points.  The manner in which the author treats the difficult subject of the origin of medicine seems to me more complete than that of authors who preceded him; … in the citations which the author makes from earlier works, from the beginning of his work on, he makes known to us passages of books which are lost to us, and may, perhaps, sometimes help us to look for them.  …

In order to carry out this work, I had on my desk three manuscripts of Ibn Abi Usaibia, belonging to the Bibliotheque Imperiale, one of which is merely an abridgement of the complete work:

1.  No. 674 of the Supplement arabe, drawn up by Reinaud, quarto manuscript, 150 folios, but incomplete and only containing the first 8 chapters.  It is in very good condition, containing here and there marginal glosses which are sometimes interesting, and is, in my opinion, the best of all the manuscripts of this work in the Bibliotheque imperiale.  This in particular allowed me to establish the text of the extract I give here.  Part of this text is in rhymed prose, and is far from easy, and is ready for printing.  I think that reading and studying it would offer more than one kind of interest and utility, and I would hope that a favourable occasion will present itself to publish it.

2.  No. 756, ancient fonds arabe; it is likewise in quarto, is composed of 138 folios, and also contains only the first 8 chapters.  This ms. is somewhat mediocre, and certainly not as good as the preceding one.

3.  No. 873, ancient fonds arabe: this is a small volume, small quarto, of 111 folios, and is an abridgement of the whole work.  Its condition would be very good, but unfortunately it has so suffered from damp and from other causes that it is often illegible.

Finally, as may be seen below, I also made use of the manuscript of this work which is in the Bibliotheque imperiale, Supplement arabe 673, and which is the only one that is complete.  This is a folio volume, of 273 folios, modern and mediocre.

I cannot avoid saying something about the Arab author and his works.  Some details on this may be found in the work of Abou’l mahacin, under the year 668 AH, at the end [1], in Hadji Khalfah[2], Reiske [3], Wustenfeld [4], etc, but particularly in the last two chapters of Ibn Abi Usaibia’s own work, where the author speaks several times about his family and himself[5].  I will content myself with giving, in summary, a small number of the most important facts.

The name of our author was Mouwaffik eddin Abou’l’abbas Ahmed, son of Abou’lkacim, son of Khalifah Alkhazradjy [6], but he is better known under the name of Ibn Abi Usaibia.  He was born at Damascus, late in the year 600 AH (1203 AD) and he learned medicine from his uncle Rachid eddin ‘Ali, son of Khalifah, practitioner of medicine and director of the hospital at Damascus for eye problems.  He also studied under his father, who was above all a surgeon and oculist.  His teacher of philosophy was the jurisconsult and philosopher Radhy eddin Aldjily (i.e. of Ghilan).  He had connections with Ibn Albaithar, who gave him some lessons on botany, with ‘Abdallathif and others among his famous contemporaries.  In the year 634 AH (1236-7 AD)  Ibn Abi Osaibia went to Cairo, where he practiced medicine, and was even employed in a hospital.  About a year later he went to Sarkhad, in Syria, and entered the service of the commandant ‘Izz eddin Aidemir, son of Abdallah, whose first doctor he became.  He died in the month of djoumada I, in the year 668 AD (January 1270 AD).  He was then almost a septugenarian, and indeed older than that according to Abou’l mahacin.

The principal work of Ibn Abi Usaibia is, without question, his History of physicians, as the real title indicates: “Sources of information on the subject of the classes of physicians”[1], and which was regarded as a classic in its genre.  He also left another book of practical medicine, entitled “Useful experiences and observations” [2].  He also had begun a third work, which he did not finish, but which he intended to call “Monuments of the nations and histories of the wise” [3]  Finally Ibn Abi Usaibia was the author of various pieces of verse, one of which, among many, was  the eulogy of the emir Amin Addaoulah, and Abou’; mahacin gives a fragment of this.

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  1. [1]BNF, ancien fonds arabe, 661, f. 219 r and v.↩
  2. [2]From BNF ms. ancien fonds arabe 875.↩
  3. [3]Opuscula medica ex monumentis Arabum et Hebraeorum, Grunier, p.55-6.↩
  4. [4]Geschichte der arabischen Aertze und Naturforscher, p.132.↩
  5. [5]See, among others, the biography of Ibn Albaithar, that of Abdallail, and notably the biography of his uncle Rachid eddin ‘Aly.↩
  6. [6]And therefore belonged to the tribe of the Khazradj.↩

Galen: what the Arab knew and we only discovered in 2006

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still OCR-ing the English translation of Ibn Abi Usaibia’s dictionary of medical writers.  But I have just come across the following line, in a list of Galen’s books:

In his book “The Negation of Grief” he says that many of his books and much of his valuable furniture were burnt in the royal storehouses in Rome.

Some of the books that were destroyed were manuscripts of Aristotle; others were manuscripts of Anaxagoras and Andromachus which he had corrected under the guidance of his teachers and of people who had studied them with Plato (he had traveled to a distant city for this purpose). He mentions many other things lost in that fire, but they are too numerous to be indicated here.

Al-Mubashshir ibn Fātik says: “Among Galen’s books that were burnt were Rufus’ on theriacs and poisons, the treatment of poisoned people and the composition of drugs (according to disease and time) and — dearest to him — the books written on white silk, with black covers, for which he had paid a high price.”

 This is a reference to the previously unknown Peri Alupias, (On grief) only rediscovered quite by accident very recently in the monastery of Vlatadon in Thessalonica in 2006.  Yet clearly in the 13th century Ibn Abi Usaibia knew the work.  It’s a good summary, too, as these extracts make plain.

Where there is one lost work, of course, there might be more.  But my efforts to get a copy of the catalogue of Vlatadon — from 1918, if I remember rightly — were all in vain.  Librarians blithered about possible copyright, drat them.  These people are paid from money exacted from the poor to make stuff accessible, but do they do it?  Do they heck!

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Islamic medical manuscripts now online at the Wellcome trust

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A correspondent directs my attention to an announcement by the Wellcome Trust.

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library’s Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry.

Curiously the manuscripts are hosted in Egypt, at the new Library of Alexandria site.  The “Browse and find” reveals 121 manuscripts.  I did a search on “Ibn Abi”. I was looking for Ibn Abi Usaibia, but the last name is spelled so variously that I had no hope of locating it thereby.  I find that an ms. of this work does exist, WMS Arabic 432 and 433.

A very welcome discovery indeed.

Interestingly you can download PDF’s of manuscripts, at least in principle.  This is very welcome!  It is far easier to work with a local PDF than remotely.  But on my first attempt I couldn’t get the “all  images as PDF” to work.

So I tried again in Firefox, for just a single page, and it tried to open something in a new tab, which was blank.  Then I reconfigured Firefox; in the Options, Applications, for Adobe Acrobat documents I changed the Action to “Save file”.  When I pressed to download a page, it saved something with file name “pdf” (that’s the entire file name!) in my download directory.  Renaming it to 1.pdf and double-clicking on the file brought up the image. 

Retrying with “all images as PDF” still didn’t do anything.  I just left Firefox open and went off to work on something else, and eventually it opened the download window — again it named the download file “pdf”.  So patience is required, it seems.  And they need to fix that filename issue.

Of course if this is how the Wellcome Library stuff is being made available at the Library of Alexandria, possibly there are more mss for download available!

UPDATE: I note that 432 is not online.  So not all the mss are available.

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An unintentionally humorous passage in Ibn Abi Usaibia

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following passage in the dictionary of medical writers by the 13th century Islamic writer Ibn Abi Usaibia made me chuckle.

The physicians of note who lived in the time between Hippocrates and Galen, apart from Hippocrates’ own pupils and his sons, were the following: S . . . , the commentator on Hippocrates’ books; Ancilaus the physician, Erasistratus II, the dogmatist; Lyco, Milo II, Gallus, Mircaritus, the author of a book on medicaments, Scalus, a commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Mantias, another commentator on Hippocrates’ works, Gallus of Tarentum, Magnus of Emesa, the author of a book on urination, who lived 90 years; Andromachus, who lived 90 years: Abras [?] also known as the “Remote,” Sounachos the Athenian, the author of a book on drugs and pharmacology, and Rufus the Great, who was from the city of Ephesus and was unrivaled his time in the medical art.

Poor Magnus, to be so remembered, from a life of 90 years.

Likewise the unfortunate Abras must have had a rough time at school.  “Pass me the ‘remote’, boy” gains a whole new meaning!

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still full of cold, but I have been trying to get back to the keyboard. In fact I have managed to proof the OCR output for the first chunk — very small chunk! — of Ibn Abi Usaibia, and confirmed to myself that it’s doable.  Working on this, therefore, will be a nice winter project. 

It’s not been too difficult, as there are not a lot of strange characters so far.  The translator has indicated long vowels with an overscore, and some t’s and d’s and s’s with a dot underneath.  I do wonder whether they are all necessary.  Is it really necessary to write “Allah” with an overscore over the second ‘a’?

An email has arrived from my friends at Les éditions du Cerf, confirming that they forgot to purchase from the editor the supposed copyright in the Greek text of the ecloge of Eusebius’ Gospel Problems and Solutions.  So I don’t owe them a royalty for using it in my book.  Not that the royalty was in any way oppressive — they were very decent folk, charged very little, and I highly recommend them to anyone who needs to reprint a text from the Sources Chrétiennes series.  But this scam among academic publishers, of claiming copyright of the original text of a modern edition of some ancient author, is so widespread that they doubtless feel obliged to do the same, and no blame to them.  It seems that Claudio Zamagni, the editor, retains ownership of any putative rights over the Greek text, and I know that he doesn’t believe that such a copyright should morally exist.  I agree with him there, as I have said before.  This also removes any legal obstacle to me placing the whole PDF of the book online when the time comes.  So everyone wins, and I will find some way to make a donation to the SC so they don’t lose out either.

Meanwhile I’m having some interesting times dealing with orders for the book via book-dealers.  One Italian bookshop ordered a copy ages ago, but has yet to pay.  Another Dutch bookshop seems better, but still no cash.  I think that I will go over to the system of requiring payment in advance, for anything else seems to make work and worry.  I’ve posted notices of the appearance of the book in a couple of online fora.

Annoyingly, I’m still too full of cold to sit at my computer much, and I am getting very tired of sitting around.  Isn’t it infuriating to be prevented from doing anything by a miserable cold virus?!  To have millions of useful, interesting and enjoyable things to do, and to feel too unwell to do any of them?  But I am mildly cheered to discover that during his 40’s C. S. Lewis — whose letters I am still reading — changed from having flu once a year to once a term, and started getting lumbago.  “At least I do better than that!” I thought to myself.  I think Lewis became old quite early, and indeed died at age 65 after ten years of illnesses.  In a letter he remarks that in his family this was normal.  Most of us will be more fortunate, I think. 

It is interesting that he allowed the ‘duty’ of correspondence with strangers to occupy so much of his time, after he became known through his broadcast talks on the BBC.  I think that he should probably have been rather more hard-hearted in this.  It is a warning to all of us, that we probably should ignore more emails than we do.  He also made the classic mistake of taking on domestic servants in order to find them a job — as being ‘deserving’ — rather than for their efficiency.  As a result he lived in continual discomfort.  The abolitionist William Wilberforce committed the same error, and with the same results. 

Talking of old age, I had a magazine come through my door from a professional organisation to which I belong.  This had an article on pensions, written by some financial advisor type.  It suggested, risibly, that to give the sort of income he thought adequate, most of us should be paying into our pensions something between 2,000-3,000 GBP a month.  I can’t imagine anyone in a position to do this, in these straitened times, and I certainly am not one of them.  But probably the man who wrote it hoped to gain a percentage commission of these vast sums, and chose his numbers accordingly. 

I’m currently still reading the collected letters of C. S. Lewis — volume 2, not volume 3, as I mistakenly supposed yesterday.  One author whom he quotes with great approval is Novalis.  I remember, many years ago, going into a German bookshop in Munchen-Gladbach and coming out with a copy of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.  But my German is wretched, and I could make nothing of it.  The interesting thing is that I don’t think Lewis’ German was that great either — although he refers to reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the original, and finding that there were about five times as many in that language, and many very sinister or sad.  But if so, how did he read Novalis?  Or is there an English translation, unbeknownst to me?

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve decided to have a go at OCR’ing Ibn Abi Usaibia myself, now I have established that the OCR quality is not really that bad.  I’ve taken the first 195 pages and divided that up into 4 Abbyy Finereader projects, of 50 pages each (well, 3 lots of 50 and one lot of 45).  I’ve also customised the English language recognition by creating a new language “English and Arabic” and adding a bunch of vowels with overscores etc to it.  It works reasonably well, I find. 

This should be a relaxing thing to work on in the coming weeks, as it gets colder.  There is no actual rush to get it done, after all.  I’ve cancelled the job I placed at PeoplePerHour.com — there were some good and interesting quotes, but I will enjoy doing it myself. 

But I can’t do much with it at the moment — too full of cold and too muzzy-headed today.

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