Medical Works of Rhazes (The Comprehensive Book)

Crit. sub.

it can be learned by any mortal, however diligent or laborious. For how many are there today, I ask, among those initiated into medicine—even if endowed with the sharpest intellect and further well-instructed in the circle of disciplines they call enkuklopaideia the circle of learning/encyclopedia—who could hope to even read, let alone understand, Galen alone (from whom everything, without controversy, has been handed down well and copiously) in less than an entire decade, even if all other studies and business were abandoned and one devoted himself to this alone? What is more, it has been persuaded to men of the highest judgment and most expert in medicine that even if someone in this age of ours were to read nothing but Galen for twenty years, he would still never become a good physician. For that reason, due to the change of times and regions, some things must necessarily be borrowed from the moderns as well—but enough of that. In a word, whoever prefers to know something rightly and truly in active medicine in a few things, rather than deceive men and appear to know much, let him not decline to devote his work to Rhazes with more diligent study (while not neglecting Hippocrates and Galen in the meantime). His reading is useful, if not pleasant. Furthermore, since life is short but art is long, it is safer to accurately follow those few and certain things, and matters rather than delights, than to entrust oneself to a vast ocean.

But I am wandering too far from my plan and detaining you too long, most splendid Abbot. It remains for me to say three little words regarding the dignity and order of the books of this work. First, after a very brief Isagoge introduction, he wrote ten books for King Mansor, in which I do not know what you could desire regarding practice. For in the first, he encompasses the foundation of the whole art, without which the rest are built in vain: anatomy in known order, and with a succinct perigraphe description/outline or enumeration, it embraces all parts of the body and whatever Hippocrates treated in his books on the nature of bones, on the nature of the fetus, on flesh, on seven- and eight-month births, on dissection, on the heart, on glands, and on human parts, and briefly whatever Galen treats in twenty-seven anatomical volumes. In the second, he expresses Galen’s books on temperaments, Hippocrates’ on humors, and the physiognomonike methodos physiognomic method of Aristotle and Adamantius. In the third, he placed Hippocrates’ books peri diaites on diet and Galen’s on the faculties of foods and simples like a statue in a temple. In the fourth, he puts before the eyes the books on maintaining health by Galen and P. Aegineta. In the fifth and sixth, he succinctly encompasses what Galen and others treat more diffusely on the composition of medicines according to location and elsewhere. The seventh encompasses the sum of those things which Hippocrates treated in his books on wounds, fractures, dislocations, ulcers, and fistulas, and the sixth book of P. Aegineta in summary. In the eighth, however, he teaches what Hippocrates did in his books peri noson on diseases, and Polybus in the books peri pathen on ailments, and another elsewhere attributed to Hippocrates, peri hieras nosou on the sacred disease, and what Galen did in his books on affected parts and the method of healing, as well as kata topous by locations. The tenth corresponds to Galen’s books on the differences of fevers, the last seven of the method of healing, the first book to Glaucon, Hippocrates’ books on prognostics, and the same Galen’s books on judgments, on critical days, and finally on pulses. We have attempted to snatch this work from the mire with a paraphrastic interpretation, certainly with great sweat, and to clothe it in a more delicate garment of Latin speech, but having devoured the ox, we faltered at the tail due to health. How much labor I had to undergo here, let no one easily believe, unless he has attempted similar things.