Arabian medicine : being the Fitzpatrick lectures delivered at the College of physicians in November 1919 and November 1920 / by Edward G. Browne.

  • Browne, Edward Granville, 1862-1926.
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Arabian medicine : being the Fitzpatrick lectures delivered at the College of physicians in November 1919 and November 1920 / by Edward G. Browne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    PREFACE In the course of the last ten years there have been con¬ ferred upon me two public honours which have given me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction, my election in 1911 as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and the presentation, on the occasion of my fifty-ninth birthday in February, 1921, of a complimentary address (accompanied by very beautiful presents) signed by a number of representative Persians, expressing their ap¬ preciation of the services which, they were kind enough to say, I had rendered to their language and literature. I hope that this little book may be regarded, not as a discharge, but as an acknowledgment, of this double debt. In it I have sought on the one hand to indicate the part played by the scholars and physicians of Islam, and especially of Persia, in the transmission of medical science through the dark ages from the decline of the ancient to the rise of the modern learning; and on the other to suggest to lovers of Arabic and Persian litera¬ ture in the wider sense that hitherto they have perhaps allowed the poets and euphuists to occupy a dispropor¬ tionate amount of their attention, to the exclusion of the scientific Weltanschauung which, to a greater degree in the medieval East than in the modern West, forms the background of these lighter, though more artistic, efforts. Indeed, as I have attempted to show in these