هذا كتاب الاسباب والعلامات الحكيم
’موسى بن ميمون القرطبي الاسرايلي
‘This is the book of the causes and symptoms, by the Doctor Mûsa ibn
Maimûn the Cordovan, the Israelite.’ (Plate XLI.)
As a matter of fact it is no such thing. This title, together with
an extra title-page and colophon in the same hand, is a much later
addition to the MS., which also has a fragment of some other medical
work--at present unidentified--bound up with it. The folios of the MS.
which deal with the _Tractatus_ have been bound together in extreme
disorder, but examination of them has shown that they really form a
fragment of the second book of المختار قي الطبّ, the _Delectus de
Medicina_, by مهذب الدين ابو الحسن على بن احهد البغدادي, Muhaḏḏib ed
Din Abu’l Hasan Ali Ibn Aḥmad of Bagdad.[360]
Ibn Abi ‛Uṣaibia (1203-1269)[361] gives a life of this writer and
a list of his works, which includes the _Delectus de Medicina_.
According to him, Muhaḏḏib ed Din was born at Bagdad in A.H. 515 (=
A.D. 1121), and after studying medicine and philosophy settled at
Mosul. Later he became the physician of the Shah Arman, chieftain
of Khalāt on Lake Van in Armenia, in whose service he amassed great
wealth. He completed the _Delectus_ at Mosul in the year A.H. 560
(= A.D. 1164), and died there in A.H. 610 (= A.D. 1213), with the
reputation of being first physician of his time.
Another fragment of the same work of Muhaḏḏib ed Din, which includes
most of the contents of the Bodleian MS., besides a good deal of
material which has been lost from the latter, exists in the British
Museum.[362] The Leyden Library contains a unique copy of the work in
three books. This is claimed to be complete by the Catalogue of the
library,[363] although Bar Hebraeus [1226-1286]--Catholicus of the
Jacobite (Monophysite) Church[364]--says that the work ran into four
parts.[365] The three books of the Leyden MS. treat (i) of generalities
(i.e. Anatomy, Physiology, and the general causes of disease), (ii) of
medicaments, and (iii) of particular diseases and their treatment.
The Bodleian and British Museum MSS. contain part of the third book,
which was probably in general use by itself as a dictionary of
medicine. The British Museum copy has only lost the earlier chapters
of this third part, but the Bodleian MS., although possessing a few
more chapters at the beginning, is far less complete in the other
portions.[366]
Wüstenfeld and the bibliographers that followed him have evidently
derived their information concerning these MSS. from the catalogues of
the Bodleian Library and of the Bibliothèque Nationale. No mediaeval
bibliographer has up to the present been found who mentions this book
of Maimonides.[367] Wüstenfeld’s usual authority for his statements
is the great thirteenth-century medical biographer, Ibn Abi ‘Uṣaibia.
But, though the latter gives a life of the Hebrew physician and a list
of his writings,[368] he makes no mention of the _Tractatus de Causis
et Indiciis Morborum_. Moreover, this _Tractatus_ has no place in Haji
Khalfa’s admirable bibliography of Arabic works, which contains notices
of four books bearing the title _De Causis et Indiciis Morborum_, not
one of which is by Maimonides. Lastly, neither the historian Al Qifty
in his _Classes philosophorum et astronomorum et medicorum_,[369] nor
Bar Hebraeus, who is said to have plagiarized him,[370] notice the work
in their sketches of the physician’s life.
The Bodleian MS. alleged to contain the _Tractatus_ is one of a
collection of over seven hundred volumes bequeathed to the library
on his death, November 2, 1713, by Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop
successively of Cashel, Dublin, and Armagh. Most of his Oriental MSS.
had been procured for him either in the East by Robert Huntington,
Bishop of Raphoe and chaplain to the English merchants at Aleppo, or
at the sale of Golius’s library at Leyden in October 1696.[371] Golius
was a Dutch orientalist, born at Leyden in 1596. He studied medicine
and Oriental languages at the University of Leyden, and after leaving
it he accompanied a French embassy to Morocco in 1622. He remained in
Morocco for two years, and while there collected various MSS. On his
return in 1624 he was appointed to the Chair of Arabic at Leyden, but
was allowed a period of leave for travel in the East before taking up
his appointment. He took with him a grant of money for the purchase of
MSS., and these to the number of over two hundred are now deposited
in the University Library at Leyden. On several occasions during his
travels in Arabia attempts were made by Arab chiefs to detain him for
his medical knowledge, but he returned safely and later wrote a number
of works mainly concerned with Arabic. He died in 1667.
Among the MSS. which Golius himself procured for the Leyden Library
was that of the _Delectus_. It is at least unlikely therefore that
such a profound Arabist, who was also a medical man, would have bought
the Bodley fragment for a genuine work of Maimonides; the primary
responsibility for the error thus probably rests with Huntington.
However that may be, it was Uri, in his catalogue of the Bodleian MSS.,
who first published the error, and from him it was passed on to the
modern bibliographers.
John Uri was a Hungarian who had studied Oriental literature under
Schultens at Leyden, and was recommended to Archbishop Secker for the
purpose of cataloguing the Bodleian Oriental MSS., by Sir Joseph Yorke,
then ambassador in the Netherlands.[372] Many years were occupied in
the preparation of the work, which appears to have commenced in 1766
and was not completed till 1787. In spite of the length of time which
Uri occupied in his task, his successor, Pusey, found sufficient errors
in it to fill sixty closely printed pages. In his preface to the
second volume of the Catalogue, issued in 1835,[373] Pusey complains
‘Urius vero MSS. haud raro negligenter exscripsit’, and says that on
re-examination of Uri’s work he discovered, ‘besides the errors which
Uri himself would have admitted, that nearly all the purchasers of
these books, Pocock alone excepted, had had spurious works foisted
on them by wily Orientals. He therefore looked through all the books
which Uri had enumerated, excepting the more common ones, to see if
they corresponded to their titles or not. By doing this he discovered
various irregularities. In some cases the titles had been covered
over with paper or obliterated with ink, or practically erased with a
knife. In others, by slight changes in the authors’ names, more famous
people were indicated as responsible for the works. Lastly, by changing
the pagination in some of the volumes fragments were represented as
complete works, and a few pages of one work were even occasionally
sewn on at the beginning of another.’[374]
Uri’s errors will be the more readily condoned when it is remembered
that he did not specialize on the Arabic MSS. alone, and that his
work seeks to catalogue, _for the first time_, a two hundred years’
accumulation of Oriental MSS., including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac,
Aethiopic, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Coptic writings. Nevertheless,
Uri’s entry with reference to the present MS. deserves some of Pusey’s
criticism. The MS. has three parts, each written in a different hand,
the first and most important part being the supposed _Tractatus de
Causis et Indiciis Morborum_, which covers folios 2-87. The second part
is a fragment of some as yet unidentified medical work (folios 88-115);
and the third, consisting of the first and last folios, gives us an
introduction and an end piece to the first part.
The alleged author and translator are named on the first page:
هذا كتاب موسى ابن ميمون الفه
للعموم قاطبا وقد نقله التميمي
الشيخ سليمان الحبشى المكنا بابن حبيش
في مملكة القدس الشريغة
تم
‘This is the book of Mûsa ibn Maimûn which he put together as a
compilation for general use. Al Tamimi, the sheikh Sulaiman the
Abyssinian, known as Ibn Ḥubaish,[375] translated it in the noble
city of Jerusalem. Finis.’
On the next page there is an introduction to the book which commences:
بسم الله الرحمان الرحيم
قال موسى ابن ميمون القرطبى الاسرايلي الخ
‘In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.
So says Mûsa ibn Maimûn, the Cordovan, the Israelite,’ &c.
The whole of the passage is an extract from chapter vi of the Aphorisms
of Maimonides, adapted as a kind of introduction, and runs as follows:
قد علمت في قولي هذا في قوة النفسيه والقوة الحيوانيه والقوة
الطبيعيه ولنسم الان في هذا الاصطلاح جميع افعال البدنيه
للانسان قول ان اشرف الافعال التنفس وبعده النبط والاحساس
واشرف الاحواس البصر ثم السمع وبعده الاحساس شهوة الطعام
والشراب وبعد ذلك الكلام وبعد ذلك التمييز اعني الذي بها التفل(_sic_)
والفكر وبعد ذلك الحلافه لساير الاعضاء علي المعتادة وهذه الرتبة
في شرف انما هي بحسب ضرورية الحيوة او صالحية فتعلم ان
الطبيعة اسم مشترك يقال علي معنى كثيرة كالقوة المدبرة (_sic_)الحيوان
ايضا طبيعية وما هو اشرف وتمسكت للاشرف في الاشراف وهذه
الاسباب الذي قد رايناها ورتبناها وهو الابتداء في النزلات الزكاميه
من الراس
_Trans._ ‘I teach in this discourse of mine concerning the animal
power, the vital power, and the natural power, but we will here
call all man’s bodily functions by one name. There is a saying that
the noblest of the functions is breathing, next the pulse, and
lastly the senses. Of the senses, the noblest is sight, which is
followed by hearing. Following on the senses is the appetite for
food and drink, after it being speech and then the mind; I mean
that which contains the reason and the intellect. Next comes the
[?] allocation of [the various powers to] the other parts of the
body according to the customary manner. This arrangement in order
of nobility is only according to the requirements of life or [?]
health.
‘You will recognize that “nature” is an equivocal term which can
be used in many meanings. [One of these meanings,] for example, is
“the motive power of animals”. So, too, is “natural”.
[??...] ‘and that which is nobler. And you will retain the noblest
of the noble [functions]. And these causes which we have noticed
we have set down in their order; and the beginning is concerning
catarrhal discharges from the head.’