Doctors and ethics: the earlier historical setting of professional ethics

(p. 142); the meaningless Arabic 'rs proves to be a corruption of the name of the Lydian city of Daldis (p. 196); the obvious error of translating pi'sos "peas", as aruzz, "rice", is quite plausibly explained in terms of a corruption in the Greek text available to the Arabic translator (p. 196). One is frequently struck by unexpected ways in which Arabic translators took their own vocabulary to apply to the task of translation. The Arabic adib, for example, quite predictably renders k6smios, "wellbehaved", or pepaideumenos, "educated", but for it to be taken as equivalent to kritikos, "one able to judge" (p. 136), is quite surprising. On the other hand, the problem may be that the correct reading of the Arabic (in several places in the passages) is arib, "shrewd", "clever", orthographically very similar to adib in manuscripts, especially of the eleventh century and after. In other cases, it is clearer that translators were encountering difficulties, perhaps due to problems involving an intermediary translation into Syriac. The Greek schoivos means "rushes", but the Arabic term used to translate it, idhkhir, means "lemon grass", a common pharmacological item in medieval Arabic materia medica (p. 184). The Arabic arz, "pine tree", is an appropriate rendering of peuk&S, "[Corsican] pine", or pftus, "[stone] pine", but not libanot6s, "frankincense tree" (p. 195). It is, of course, a vaulable outcome of the compilation of this work that attention is drawn to such specifics. Medical historians will continue to find this lexicon indispensable to the study of the transmission of Greek medical texts. The classics of the field loom large in the corpus, and many textual problems are discussed. Medical terminology is recognized as a distinct category and treated as such. To judge from the scope of the fascicles published thus far, the Lexicon promises to be a work of considerable length. It is therefore encouraging to see the editors proceeding at an expeditious pace and providing cumulative glossaries and indices. It will be some years before the work is completed, but it is already a research tool of great value.