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

Decline and decadence in Iraq and Syria after the age of Avicenna? : ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (1162–1231) between myth and history

‘Abd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī’s (d. 1231) work Book of the Two Pieces of Advice (Kitāb al Nasīḥatayn) challenges the idea that Islamic medicine declined after the twelfth century AD. Moreover, it offers some interesting insights into the social history of medicine. ‘Abd al-Laṭīf advocated using the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day; he argued that female and itinerant practitioners, relying on experience, were superior to some rationalists. He lambasted contemporaneous medical education because it put too much faith in a restricted number of textbooks such as the Canon by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna, d. 1037) or imperfect abridgments

Two New Texts on Medicine and Natural Philosophy by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī

This is the final version of the article. Available from American Oriental Society via the DOI in this record.This paper introduces two newly discovered epistles by the celebrated physician and phiiosopher Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā al-Rāzī (Rhazes, d. ca. 925). The first epistle addresses the question of why and how clothing can be used both to stay warm and to stay cool, drawing on the Aristotelian tradition of problem literature (problémata physikd). The second epistle arises out of a court polemic and treats the question of whether one should consume mulberries after watermelons. This study offers analysis, editions, and translations of these previously unknown epistles, situating them within their broader literary and cultural contexts

Computational Techniques in Multispectral Image Processing : Application to the Syriac Galen Palimpsest

Multispectral and hyperspectral image analysis has experienced much development in the last decade. The application of these methods to palimpsests has produced significant results, enabling researchers to recover texts that would be otherwise lost under the visible overtext, by improving the contrast between the undertext and the overtext. In this paper we explore an extended number of multispectral and hyperspectral image analysis methods, consisting of supervised and unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques, on a part of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest dataset (www.digitalgalen.net). Of this extended set of methods, eight methods gave good results: three were supervised methods Generalized Discriminant Analysis (GDA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA); and the other five methods were unsupervised methods (but still used in a supervised way) Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (GPLVM), Isomap, Landmark Isomap, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis (PPCA). The relative success of these methods was determined visually, using color pictures, on the basis of whether the undertext was distinguishable from the overtext, resulting in the following ranking of the methods: LDA, NCA, GDA, Isomap, Landmark Isomap, PPCA, PCA, and GPLVM. These results were compared with those obtained using the Canonical Variates Analysis (CVA) method on the same dataset, which showed remarkably accuracy (LDA is a particular case of CVA where the objects are classified to two classes).Comment: 29 February - 2 March 2016, Second International Conference on Natural Sciences and Technology in Manuscript Analysis, Centre for the study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg, German

The Syriac Galen Palimpsest::Research Methods and Latest Discoveries

In this article, we provide an update on the progress of the AHRC-funded Syriac Galen Palimpsest Project, which is directed by Peter E. Pormann at the University of Manchester. We also present a newly identified folio from Book 3 of Galen’s On Simple Drugs—a book hitherto not known to be represented in the manuscript. We offer some preliminary conclusions about the original medical manuscript’s codicological structure, particularly the composition of its quires and the sequence of hair and flesh sides of parchment. Finally, we outline our approach to analysing the undertext’s palaeography, with reference to the methodology devised by Ayda Kaplan

Continuing research on the Syriac Galen Palimpsest:Collaborative Implementation within the Framework of Two European Projects

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