Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker, wrote many works in Hebrew and Arabic. His topics were not restricted to philosophy and theology; as is suggested by the fact that he was employed as a court physician for most of his life: he composed quite a few books on medicine. The existence of many Arabic manuscripts of his medical works as well as of their Hebrew translations manifests the enormous importance of his achievement in medicine, especially for Jewish society. Maimonides’ original Arabic versions of these medical works, however, had never been published, whereas Hebrew translations of them were printed (uncritically) by Muntner. Thus, Gerrit Bos began his project entitled ‘Medical Works of Moses Maimonides’, and is publishing many Arabic critical editions of Maimonides’ medical books based on Arabic manuscripts, frequently comparing them with their Hebrew and Latin versions. Maimonides’ Medical Aphorisms is one of his main targets in this project.
The title ‘Medical Aphorisms’ clearly shows that Maimonides composed this work by imitating the style of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. The Hippocratic Aphorisms consist of short sentences on important topics in medicine, and Greek medical students tried to memorise the aphorisms in order to obtain the basic set of medical knowledge. Because of its handiness for educational use, this Hippocratic work gained great popularity not only in the Greek tradition, but also in the Arabo-Islamic world, where many scholars composed commentaries on it. (On the Arabic tradition of the Hippocratic Aphorisms, see Peter E. Pormann and N. Peter Joosse, ‘Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms in the Arabic Tradition: The Example of Melancholy,’ in Epidemics in Context: Greek Commentaries on Hippocrates in the Arabic Tradition, Peter E. Pormann (ed.) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 211–49.) Following the Arabic tradition of the Hippocratic Aphorisms, Maimonides collected maxims from Galen’s works, sorted them according to the subjects, and composed his own Aphorisms in 25 treatises entitled Medical Aphorisms. From among them, Bos has already published three volumes containing treatises 1–15. The volume under review includes treatises 16–21, which are on women’s diseases, the regimen of health in general, physical exercises, bathing, food and beverages and their consumption, and drugs.
As he did in the previous volumes, Bos thoroughly clarifies the source of each aphorism. His citation-search effort enables us to understand which of Galen’s books Maimonides regarded as the basic set for medical education when he wrote the Medical Aphorisms. And if we have Arabic translations of Galen’s works, most of which were composed by Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his circle, we can more clearly see how Maimonides handled Galen’s texts, although Bos generally compares the aphorisms with Galen’s Greek texts, not their Arabic versions which Maimonides directly used, probably because, unfortunately, only a very few Arabic translations of Galen’s works are published, while most of them remain in Arabic manuscript form. From his careful detective work on the sources, however, we realise that Maimonides thought Galen had more authority than Hippocrates. For example, he informs us that Medical Aphorisms 16.26:
‘When the breasts of a pregnant woman shrink so much that they become emaciated and thin, you should expect that she will miscarry. If she is pregnant with twins and one of her breasts becomes emaciated and thin, one of her foetuses will be aborted.’
is from Galen’s De locis affectis, 6.5 (see p. 147 n. 47). But obviously Galen used here Hippocrates’ Aphorisms 5.37:
‘In a pregnant woman, if the breasts suddenly lose their fullness, she has a miscarriage’
and 5.38:
‘If, in a woman pregnant with twins, either of her breasts lose its fullness, she will part with one of her children; and if it be the right breast which becomes slender, it will be the male child, or if the left, the female.’
(Arabic text in John Tytler, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates (Calcutta: Education Press for Committee of Public Instruction, 1832), 46–7; other similar examples are found, eg. in Medical Aphorisms 16.36; see Bos’s notes 62 and 64 on p. 147.) Since Maimonides wrote a commentary on the Hippocratic Aphorisms itself (the text and English translation of which Bos will publish soon in the same series; see p. 145 n. 25), Maimonides definitely knew that Galen composed this sentence by combining these two lemmata from Hippocrates’ Aphorisms. This example suggests that even if Hippocrates was the original author of the dictum, Maimonides chose Galen’s reference due to his authority. This tendency reveals his aim in writing the Medical Aphorisms: constructing his medical education system based solely on the works written by Galen, the most authoritative Greek medical scholar, with the update of practical knowledge such as pharmacology by adding information taken from books composed by authors contemporary with him including ibn Wafid (see Bos’ introduction, pp. xvii–xxii).
This short analysis illustrates the importance of publishing the Arabic texts of Maimonides’ medical works, when we explore the history of medicine. Bos has made a great contribution to the scholarship by providing this critical material.
