The medical compendium entitled Zād al-musāfir wa-qūt al-ḥāḍir (Provisions for the Traveller and the Nourishment for the Sedentary) and compiled by Ibn al-Jazzār from Qayrawān in the tenth century is one of the most influential medical handbooks in the history of western medicine. In the eleventh century, Constantine the African translated it into Latin; this translation was the basis for the commentaries by the Salernitan masters from the twelfth century on, and was popular in Jewish circles as well, as is attested by the fact that it was translated into Hebrew three times. The current volume covers Book 7, chapters seven to thirty of Ibn al-Jazzār’s compendium. These chapters cover a wide variety of external afflictions such as measles and smallpox; bites and stings; rabies; tumours; warts and calluses, leprosy, scurf and eczema, pruritus and scabies, furuncles, scrofula, sharā and heat rashes; fractures and dislocations; haemorrhages caused by a sword, knife or arrow; whiteness of the nails and paronychia; burns; wounds caused by pressure from the shoes; and fissures in the hands and feet.

This book explores the intersection between medicine and literature in medieval Iberian literature and culture. Its overarching argument is that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian authors revalorized the interconnection between the body, the mind, and the soul in light of the evolving epistemology of medicine. Prior to the reintroduction of classical medical treatises through Arab authors into European cultures, mental disorders and bodily diseases were primarily attributed to moral corruption, demonic influence, and superstition. The introduction of novel regimens of health as well as treatises on melancholia into academic institutions and into the cultural landscape provided the tools for newly minted authors to understand that psychosomatic illnesses stemmed from malfunctions of the body's biochemical composition. This book demonstrates that the earliest books written in the Iberian vernaculars contain the seeds that effect the shift from a theocentric worldview to a humanistic one. The volume features close readings of multiple texts, including medical treatises and religious writings, and King Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, and Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor. Even though these texts differ in literary genre, rhetorical strategy, and even purpose, this study argues that they collectively employ humoral pathology and melancholic discourses as a means of underscoring the frailty and transience of human life by showing how somatic conditions sicken the body, mind, and soul unto death.

The short Latin treatise De curis puerorum is the translation of a lost Arabic original attributed (perhaps mistakenly) to the famous al-Rāzī (Rhazes); one of the rare texts on pediatrics circulating in the Middle Ages, it was so popular that it was soon re-translated into Hebrew, not once but three times! Gerrit Bos and Michael McVaugh have edited the Latin and Hebrew texts, accompanying them with an English translation and a full commentary situating the original Arabic against the medical writings available to tenth-century Islam. The contents of the work range remarkably widely, covering skin diseases, eye and ear infections, teething, vomiting and diarrhea, constipation, worms, and bladder stones, among other things, outlining their causes, symptoms, and possible treatments.

In The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides Gerrit Bos offers new English translations of three major and six minor medical treatises by Maimonides (1138–1204), based on the original Arabic texts and collected in one volume for the first time.

Pre-modern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In this 2000 study exploring the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab scholars used biography to tell the life-stories of important historical figures by examining the careers of the Abbasid Caliph al- Ma'mun, the Shiite Imam Ali al-Rida, the Sunni scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi, each of whom represented a tradition of political and spiritual heirship to the Prophet. Drawing on anthropology and comparative religion, as well as history and literary criticism, the book considers how each figure responded to the presence of the others and how these responses were preserved by posterity.