The fifteenth-century travel regimen entitled al-Isfār ʿan ḥikam al-asfār (‘The unveiling of the wisdoms of the books’) written by the Cairene jurist-physician Ibn al-Amshāṭī (d. 1496) is an interesting example of the postclassical medical literature. It includes, besides a travel regimen (written likely as a health guide for the pilgrimage to Mecca), a short pharmacopoeia of single and compound remedies deemed useful for the traveller. The work was composed for Kamāl al-Dīn al-Bārizī (d. 1452), the head of the Mamluk Chancery. The Arabic edition, English translation, and commentary of this text are framed by a detailed introductory study of the Arabic-language tradition of travel regimens and various medico-pharmacological glossaries.

This collection of Sonja Brentjes's articles deals with travels, encounters and the exchange of knowledge in the Mediterranean and Western Asia during the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing on three historiographical concerns. The first is how we should understand the relationship between Christian and Muslim societies, in the period between the translations from Arabic into Latin (10th - 13th centuries) and before the Napoleonic invasion of Ottoman Egypt (1798). The second concern is the "Western" discourse about the decline or even disappearance of the sciences in late medieval and early modern Islamic societies and, third, the construction of Western Asian natures and cultures in Catholic and Protestant books, maps and pictures. The articles discuss institutional and personal relationships, describe how Catholic or Protestant travellers learned about and accessed Muslim scholarly literature, and uncover contradictory modes of reporting, evaluating or eradicating the visited cultures and their knowledge.

Ibn al-Amshāṭī's (d. 1496) travel regimen, written likely as a health guide for the pilgrimage to Mecca, furthers our understanding of postclassical medicine, the history of travel medicine, and pharmacology, with an English translation making the text widely accessible.

The first monograph on Islamic hospitals, this volume examines their origins, development, architecture, social roles, and connections to non-Islamic institutions.

In Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam Housni Alkhateeb Shehada offers the first comprehensive study of veterinary medicine, its practitioners and its patients in the medieval Islamic world, with special emphasis on the Mamluk period (1250-1517).

Yaron Ayalon explores the Ottoman Empire's history of natural disasters and its responses on a state, communal, and individual level.

Offering insights and analysis in a field that has only recently come into existence, this book explores the ideals and institutions through which Middle Eastern societies—from the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. to the present day—have confronted poverty and the poor. By introducing new sources and presenting familiar ones with new questions, the contributors examine ideas about poverty and the poor, ideals and practices of charity, and state and private initiatives of poor relief over this extensive time span. They avoid easy generalizations about Islam and the Middle East as they seek to set the ideals and practices in comparative perspective.