Islamic Miniature Painting in Medical Manuscripts

Second, unrevised edition. No ISBN listed. --- Foreword: "The 96 miniatures in this volume depicting Islamic anatomy, physiology, clinical medicine and its related fields, therapy and pharmacy are reproduced in colour as a representative selection from a worldwide range of museums, libraries and public and private collections based in the USA, Germany, Italy, Egypt, France, Scotland, Turkey, the Netherlands, England, Canada, and Austria. It will not escape the attentive observer that this collection is by no means - and indeed cannot be - 'universal'. In spite of all our efforts to trace examples from every part of the world - Europe, North Africa, the Near East, the USA and Canada - there are inevitable gaps, for a great deal of material still lies in ancient oriental libraries, under the dust of centuries, untouched, unrecorded, often not even identified, much less catalogued and published. Many items were inaccessible to the author, in particular the treasures of innumerable minor madrasas (colleges, partly attached to mosques) in the western and eastern regions of Islam. Only in Turkey has any successful attempt been made so far to assemble the majority of religious, legal, literary and scientific manuscripts in a central location and make them available to the public for the purposes of study. In other Islamic states efforts are being made to follow suit. Meanwhile, the author has had to forgo much that could undoubtedly still have been found, for instance in Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and included in this work."