Islamic Medical Encyclopedia Epitomes Manuscript
After the middle of the 11th century, epitomes were produced of the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina (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 1141/536 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. A diagram for diagnosis by pulse in a copy of Ibn al-Nafis's epitome (Mujiz) of the Canon on Medicine by Avicenna. The copy is undated, possibly 17th century. 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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