A Persian Anatomical Image in a non-Muslim Manuscript from Gujarat

In 1396 (798/799), two hundred years before Vesalius, the Persian author Mans: ur ibn Muh:ammad ibn Ah:mad ibn Y usuf ibn Faq h Ily as composed a treatise on anatomy entitled Tas:r h: -i Mans: ur that summarized many of the observations of Galen. It was not the first such treatise to be composed in the Islamic world, but it was the first to be accompanied by drawings of the human body in anatomical detail. About seventy manuscripts containing these drawings survive to the present day, scattered in libraries from Baghdad to Paris, and of course in the Wellcome Library in London. This tradition of anatomical illustrations has been known to medical historians as the F€ unfbilderserie or ‘‘Five-picture’’ series since the early study by Karl Sudhoff. In fact, as the series has become better known through the study of a wider sampling of manuscripts, it has become clear that it consists of six, seven, or even more standard images. This Persian tradition of anatomical illustration has many interesting features and questions associated with it, which have more recently been discussed by Roger French, Emilie Savage-Smith, and others. For the present purposes, however, it is sufficient for us to see one of these images, in order to recognize the main pictorial details of this tradition. Figure 1 shows an example. These figures typically face the viewer (although one of the other standard figures faces away), the legs are bent, the hands are on the thighs, the head is circular, the internal organs, including intestines, are displayed, and labelled with text. After Islam, and in particular the Mughal dynasty, had established itself decisively as a cultural power in the South Asian subcontinent, manuscripts such as these were copied in