The Small Dispensatory (review)

Sābūr ibn Sahl (d. 869 A.D.), once a great physician, is currently little known. Probably a Persian in charge of the Gondēshāpūr hospital (southwestern Iraq), he moved at some time to Baghdad and was appointed court physician to the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-61 A.D.). Besides five other works on therapeutics, dietetics, and sleeping, he wrote a dispensatory (a compilation of formulas for compound medicines) attested in three versions (in Arabic): a large, a middle-sized, and a small. The last of these, contained in a ninth-century manuscript now conserved in Berlin, was edited in 1994 by Oliver Kahl.¹ It is translated here into English to be accessible to non-Arabist historians of medicine.

The text, incomplete in the manuscript, contains 408 recipes, all built on the same pattern: the name of the compound medicine (see p. 15 n. 57 for the several types), the medical conditions for which it was prescribed, its ingredients (with their quantities), its preparation, and the instructions for its administration. The translation, which includes notes of commentary, is preceded by a biography of Sābūr ibn Sahl, and a description and a first analysis of the Dispensatorium, qualified by the author himself as descriptive (p. 4) and positivistic (p. 3). The analysis includes a list of the medical conditions in the work, with their frequency (in percentages) (p. 18); a list of the Arabic terms for Galenic forms—that is, the forms under which the medicines were administered (pp. 19-20); a list of such terms for metrological units (pp. 20-21); and a similar list of the terms for pharmaceutical apparatus (pp. 21-22). A short study of Sābūr ibn Sahl's language stresses the different origins of his technical lexicon and, more generally, highlights the formation of Arabic scientific terminology during the founding period of Arabic science (pp. 22-27). On this basis, the author discusses the question of the language in which the Dispensatorium was originally written, since it has been claimed to be Syriac (pp. 26-27), the language of many of the physicians in the Arabic world in Sābūr ibn Sahl's epoch; if so, the Dispensatorium was further translated into Arabic by its author himself, or by an unknown translator, to meet the request for Arabic works from Arabic-speaking Muslims. In the absence of any evidence, Kahl accepts, at least as a temporary working hypothesis, that the text was originally written in Arabic. The introduction ends with a short overview of Sābūr ibn Sahl's sources (p. 28) and influence (p. 29).

The volume includes seven indexes, the first two with both English/Arabic and Arabic/English listings: medicinal substances and products, pathology and anatomy, generic and/or "trade" names of drugs, etymology of medicinal substances' names (items are listed by languages), and (in separate indexes) botanical, zoological, and mineralogical terms.

This translation fulfills its objective: to be a first basis for further studies on Arabic pharmacology (on the meaning of this term, see p. 3 n. 10). It certainly can be completed, for example, with references to Dioscorides, De materia medica; Galen, De antidotis; or the sources of many among the recipes. But this is exactly Kahl's purpose in publishing this translation: to put the Dispensatorium at the disposal of scholars for fresh research! There are some inconsistencies and oddities, however: In the notes of commentary, Linnaean binomials for plants are not written in italics as they should be (and are in the index). The untranslated Greek texts at p. 35 n. 7 and pp. 63-64 n. 68 contradict the intention to make the work accessible to nonphilologists (see pp. xii-xiii). The literature on Greek physicians often referred to in the notes (Der kleine Pauly, published in 1964-75) is obsolete. In...