This is a first part of the new catalogue of medical manuscripts preserved in the Wellcome Library. It serves not only as a guide to the collection of the manuscripts, purchased by the Wellcome Library in 1986, but is also an independent research tool, which can be used by various specialists: librarians, historians, paleographers, art historians, conservators, etc. This catalogue comprises detailed indices and many illustrations on cd-rom, which help researchers to consult in detail each codex prior to coming to the Wellcome Library in London to consult the manuscript per se.

Catalogue of all Arabic manuscripts in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library. Plates are facsimiles from selected Arabic works.

For centuries the development of medical science was beholden to the world of Islamic culture for the discovery, classification, and recording of human ailments and the remedies available in medieval times. The 197 Arabic manuscripts—catalogued in this volume and containing 245 works devoted to the medicine and science of the medieval Muslim era—comprise part of the rich collection of Arabic manuscripts preserved in the Wellcome Library. The volume includes items from all the major medieval authors in the history of medicine in the Islamic world and describes the earliest examples of their work.

In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting in an innovative approach to understand the many different functions these objects could fulfil in pre-modern times. Produced and used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the case studies presented here include objects that differ in size, material, language and shape. What the articles share is an all-round, in-depth approach that helps the reader understand the complexity of the objects discussed and will improve one’s understanding of the role they played within pre-modern societies. Contributors Hazem Hussein Abbas Ali, Gideon Bohak, Ursula Hammed, Juan Campo, Jean-Charles Coulon, Venetia Porter, Marcela Garcia Probert, Anne Regourd, Yasmine al-Saleh, Karl Schaefer and Petra M. Sijpesteijn.

O ye Gentlemen explores two vital strands in Arabic culture: the Greek tradition in science and philosophy and the literary tradition. They are permanent and, though drawing on Islam as a dominant religion, they are by no means dependent on it. That the strands freely interweave within the broader scope of Schrifttum is shown by more than thirty essays on subjects as varied as the social organisation of bees, spontaneous generation in the Shiʿite tradition, astronomy in the Arabian nights, the benefits of sex, precious stones in a literary text, the virtue of women in Judaeo-Arabic stories, animals in Middle Eastern music and the transmission of Arabic science and philosophy to the medieval West.