Nikolaj Serikoff, Arabic medical manuscripts of the Wellcome Library: a descriptive catalogue of the Haddād collection (WMS Arabic 401–487), Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 6, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2005, pp. xiii, 553, and CD, €175.00, $236.00 (hardback 90-04-14798-5).

Abstract

This is a catalogue of the Haddād Collection, which forms part of the Arabic manuscript collection in the Wellcome Library (London). Purchased in 1986 through Sotheby's, the manuscripts once belonged to the library of Dr Sami Ibrahim Haddād (1890–1957), a well-known Lebanese physician and historian of medicine. The eighty-seven codices described contain more than a hundred texts on various aspects of medicine and related subjects, ranging from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, all written in the Arabic language and script. The texts are works of the most renowned physicians of the medieval Islamic period including translated works of Galen and Hippocrates and numerous texts by less famous authors, some of whom are anonymous, which are important by virtue of their content. The book is also a revised version of a less complete on-line edition of the same work, published on the Wellcome Library's website (http://library.wellcome.ac.uk). While the latter offers rather limited searchability, the printed publication, enlarged by fourteen appendices, provides a well-structured analysis of the collection. The addenda consist of numerous indices, lists, tables and concordances. Some of the descriptive bibliographical information, incipits and basmallahs for example, are entirely listed in Arabic, while indices of personal names and titles are found in both transliteration and the original script. In the last appendix the reader is presented with a thumbnail index of selected images from each manuscript, which can then be viewed in digital format from the CD enclosed in the book. In a chapter on format, the author enlarges on the codicological descriptions used in the catalogue. Amongst terms such as mistara (the trace of a type of stencil used by the scribe as a tool to imprint lines onto the paper) and catchwords (the first word of a page written at the bottom of the previous one) the understanding of which the author takes for granted, the reader will discover the pace. This is a concept developed by the author and introduced as “a sequence of repeated patterns which facilitate the description and identification of the hand and the layout of a whole page”. Angles and ratios of repetitive features characteristic of a given Arabic script sample are measured with respect to the density of the text, which is calculated from the number of lines on the page and the number of links in a line. In one of the numerous appendices to this catalogue, brief instructions on how to calculate the pace can be found, followed by various pace tables for all eighty-seven manuscripts. No evaluation of this measure has however been produced, which is not surprising considering the limited number of texts and the diversity of their origin and history. Nevertheless, the reader is given the opportunity to experiment with the method, which is clearly based on much painstaking and lengthy work. As for the description of the manuscripts' contents, this work is more than just a catalogue. It deserves to be called a research tool. The very detailed accounts of single chapters of the texts, comprehensive summaries of contents, distinctions between a genuine beginning of a work and the start of the manuscript, together with reproductions of textual fragments (without corrections), provide a solid foundation for investigating the manuscripts in the collection. In short, the catalogue is a major resource for medical historians, library professionals, and other scholars interested in the subject.