Catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London / [compiled] by Stefan Strelcyn.

  • Strelcyn, Stefan
Date:
[1972]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: Catalogue of Ethiopian manuscripts of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London / [compiled] by Stefan Strelcyn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CATALOGUE OF ETHIOPIAN MANUSCRIPTS OF THE WELLCOME INSTITUTE OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE IN LONDON1 By Stefan Strelcyn Introduction The Library of the Wellcome Institute is devoted to the history of medicine and related sciences. Apart from some 250,000 printed books, it contains about 10,000 manuscripts, half of which are in Oriental languages. In 19701 was entrusted with describing the Ethiopian manuscripts belonging to this library. There were 34 of them: 17 mostly of religious content and completely unrelated to the interests of the Institute, 16 magical scrolls, and one manuscript mainly of divinatory content. Without constituting medical manuscripts in the strict sense of the term, the scrolls are designed to combat demons and diseases and to keep people in good health. They can be called magico-medical scrolls and belong to the field of ethnomedicine. The scrolls are written in Gg'qz with strong Amharic influence. At the suggestion of Dr. F. N. L. Poynter, Director of the Wellcome Institute, the Wellcome Trust decided to donate the first group of manuscripts to the British Museum, to whom 14 were presented in June 1970 and 3 others in June 1971. All these manuscripts have been described by the present writer in the Catalogue of the Ethiopian manuscripts in the British Museum acquired since 1877 (in preparation). The present catalogue notes contain only the description of the 16 scrolls and the divinatory manuscript. As far as one can tell from the notes preserved in the registers of the Library, the provenance of these scrolls is heterogeneous. As one might expect, some of them certainly come from Magdala, brought back by members of Lord Napier's expedition in 1867-8 (Nos. I, VII, VIII, XII, XIV). This is probably also true for No. XIII and perhaps for a few others as well. All these MSS were acquired by the Library between 1913 and 1930. Scrolls are never dated, and the dating I indicate is based only on palaeo- graphical criteria which are often very uncertain. It seems, however, that the MSS in our collection belong to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The richest collection of similar scrolls is to be found in the Griaule Collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, which numbers more than 160 (see Strelcyn, BN-Griaule). More than 20 scrolls can be found in the Marcel Cohen Collection (Chaine, Paris—Cohen) as well as in the Littman Collection (Murad Kamil, Littmann, Nos. 29-50). The Vatican Library possesses 25 scrolls (see Grebaut-Tisserant). Amongst the British collections the richest in magical scrolls is that of the British Museum (Strelcyn, Brit. Mus., Nos. 69-97). The 1 For bibliography and abbreviations, see pp. 54-5.