The Writing of Iranian Medical History.

but more modest historical achievements to be justly proud of. Furthermore, these authors ‘quote’ references which are pure fabrications on the part of the authors and the original sources do not contain such statements. A corollary of such a practice is that unsubstantiated statements become repeated and copied in subsequent writings of one article to the next and so these untruths become established in the literature as ‘factoids’. I shall give three examples of such a practice to illustrate the problems which we face: 1) There is a “quotation” from Arthur Christensen’s book ‘Iran under the Sassanians’, recounting the journey of seven Greek philosophers to Seleucia-Ctesiphon after the Roman Emperor Justinian had closed the school of Athens, whom Khosro I Anoushiravan welcomed and later guaranteed their safe return home. However, the statement “The Persian king welcomed them and made them teachers at Jundishapur University” does not occur in Christensen’s book and thus, it is a total fabrication where no such source reference exists to this effect. This untruth has been repeated in several articles which have referred back to