The Clift family correspondence 1792–1846

Arabic manuscripts (almost a third of McGill's Arabic holdings) comprising copies of 62 different works. The manuscripts collected by Osler were acquired mainly from a professional colleague in Hamadhan in western Iran; others were obtained later and originated in the collections of two well-known Islamists: the Russian scholar V. Ivanow, and the German physician and Arab medical historian Max Meyerhof. The manuscripts range in date from 611/1215 (no. 141) to the early twentieth century, and include many of the leading works of medieval Arabic medicine: e.g. partial copies of such massive compendia as the Al-IHiiw ft 1-tibb by al-Razr (no. 65) and the Kiimil al-sina'a aI-tibb7ya by al-Majiisi (no. 96), and exemplars of the AI-Mughn7ft 1-tibb by Ibn al-Baytar (no. 143) and the Al-'Umdaft fina'at al-jiraha by Ibn al-Quff (no. 256). The most important manuscripts would seem to be a complete Indian copy of Ibn Srna's Al-Qaiinn Jt 1-tibb (no. 161/3), dated 975/1567 but with an attested line of transmission from the author's autograph, and the first volume a fine Iraqi copy of al-Ghifiqi's JaTmi' al-adwiya al-mufrada (no. 102), copied in 654/1256 and containing 367 coloured drawings.2 There are also numerous, usually dating from the eighteenth century and later, which are works by anonymous or unknown authors on various medical subjects. Such manuals are typical of later Ottoman times and offer important insights into medical education and practice in this era. Gacek offers accurate and detailed descriptions of the manuscripts, although for the more obscure works it would be useful to have fuller incipits and excipits (these latter are often omitted) and somewhat more information on the contents of the text. Special notice should be taken of the fact that his well-known expertise in Arabic palaeography allows Gacek to assign many manuscripts to specific parts of the Islamic world based on distinctive features of the scripts. There are also 71 black and white and 8 colour plates, and 47 pages of detailed indices and concordances (essential since the manuscript entries are arranged alphabetically, rather than by subject). This catalogue is a welcome addition to the reference literature on Arabic manuscript collections, and does full justice to one such collection which can now begin to receive the attention it deserves. At a time when North American publishers are offering some truly awful examples of shoddy production where the Arabic script is concerned, the McGill University Library merits special notice for the …