The Assam Fever

'Wellcome History' is an easy and regular channel of communication between all Wellcome historians. It aims to be an informal, user-friendly centre of debate

Public health in Calcutta

'Wellcome History' is an easy and regular channel of communication between all Wellcome historians. It aims to be an informal, user-friendly centre of debate

Case notes and clinicians : Galen's commentary on the Hippocratic epidemics in the Arabic tradition

Galen’s Commentaries on the Hippocratic Epidemics constitute one of the most detailed studies of Hippocratic medicine from Antiquity. The Arabic translation of the Commentaries by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. c. 873) is of crucial importance because it preserves large sections now lost in Greek, and because it helped to establish an Arabic clinical literature. The present contribution investigate the translation of this seminal work into Syriac and Arabic. It provides a first survey of the manuscript tradition, and explores how physicians in the medieval Muslim world drew on it both to teach medicine to students, and to develop a framework for their own clinical research