Islamic Medical Encyclopedia Epitomes Manuscript, 12th Century
After the middle of the 11th century, epitomes were produced of the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna to make the ideas more readily accessible. The earliest abridgment of the Canon may have been that by Ilaqi, if he was indeed a pupil of Avicenna's (though this has been challenged by those who say that he died in 1141 and his discipleship of Avicenna was limited to his being dependent upon Avicenna's ideas). In the next two centuries, epitomes, as well as explanatory commentaries, followed in rapid succession, and it was this industry of condensing and glossing the Canon that assured the encyclopedia its pre-eminent position in medieval medicine. The colophon to a copy of al-Ilaqi's epitome of the first book of the Canon on Medicine by Avicenna, set out in the form of aphorisms. The copy was completed in 1676 by the scribe Ahmad ibn Safar. Although Greek, Roman, Hellenistic, and Islamic knowledge was communicated by handwritten manuscripts long before the printing press or other modern technologies were invented, medical and scientific authors wrote many and often long works of scholarship. Since these books could be hundreds of pages long, they were often expensive to copy, impracticable to carry, and difficult to refer to in the course of a busy and mobile practice. For these reasons, abridgments or summaries (epitomes) of larger medical works were much in demand.
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