Volume 1

The book of the ten treatises on the eye, ascribed to Hunain ibn Is-hâq (809-877 A. D.) : the earliest existing systematic text-book of ophthalmology / the Arabic text edited from the only two known manuscripts, with an English translation and glossary, by Max Meyerhof.

  • Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq al-ʻIbādī, 809?-873.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The book of the ten treatises on the eye, ascribed to Hunain ibn Is-hâq (809-877 A. D.) : the earliest existing systematic text-book of ophthalmology / the Arabic text edited from the only two known manuscripts, with an English translation and glossary, by Max Meyerhof. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lie had to confine himself to medieval Latin translations,, as the original Arabic works were either lost or unavailable, as e.g. Eliases’ (ar-Bdzi) ^j\J\ enormous Arabic collec¬ tion al Hawi, 1 (Continens), a vast compilation of all the medical knowledge of the first half of the Xth century. Nevertheless, Hirschberg’s great philological insight enabled him to discover that one of the earliest ophthal- mological text-books of the Arabs, which bears the name of The Book of the Ten Treatises (or Discourses) on the Eye, composed by Hunain Ibn Is-haq ^ (IXth cen¬ tury), exists under a false name in two different mediaeval Latin translations, viz. in the Galeni Liber de Oculis trans¬ late a Demetrio (J) and in the Liber de Oculis Constantini Africani (2). Hirschberg furnished proofs for his assertion in a very remarkable little publication (3). He found that most of the numerous quotations from the ophthal¬ mology of Hunain (Johannitius), which he had met in the Latin translation of ar-Eazi’s ^j\)\ great medical encyclopedia (4), occurred again in both of the afore-mentioned Latin ophthalmic books. Moreover, the sequence of chapters in these two treatises corresponds exactly to that of Hunain’s Ten Treatises on the Eye as given by the Arab medical historian Ibn Abi Usaibffa 1 . These three Latin translations, although very badly made and carelessly printed, enabled Hirschberg to trace the general course of this early Arabic ophthalmology and to state that all the later oculists had borrowed from (x) In Galeni Optra omnia, Venetiis, 1541, vol. VIII, 1545, p. 683 foil, and in other editions of Galen’s works (o). (2) In Omnia Opera Ysaac, etc., Lugduni, 1515, foil. 172-178 r. See our remarks on p. XXXIV (l). (3) J. HntscHBEKG, Ueber das alteste arabische Lehr buck der Augen- heilfcunde. Sitzungsber der Konigl, Preuss. Akad. d. Wissenschaften, XLIX, 1903, November 26 (V). - ----- (4) Rhasis El-Havy, i.e. Ccpitinens, first edition, Brixiae 1486, later editions Venetiis 1500, 1506, 1509 (A).