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  • Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah
  • Samuel S. Kottek
Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar. Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah. Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series. Leiden: Brill, 2008. x + 619 pp. Ill. $237.00, €169.00 (978-90-04-16120-7).

The Genizah collection is a huge compound of documents, most of them fragmentary, written in Hebrew letters, mostly in Judeo-Arabic or Arabic, with others [End Page 928] in Hebrew. These writings, which were found in the ancient synagogue of Fostat in Cairo, reflect many aspects of the life and events of the Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period. The bulk of these documents is housed in the Cambridge University Library, comprising some 140,000 items.

Lev and Amar's voluminous work is not just a pharmacopoeia based on the Genizah collection. It is the result of an in-depth study that required adequate knowledge of languages, paleography, botany, pharmacology, and ethno-pharmacy. In their introduction, the authors mention that some forty years ago, S. D. Goitein had already remarked that Egyptian Jews were prominent, during the time covered by the Genizah documents, in the professions of druggist and pharmacist, as well as in the trade of spices and drugs (p. 12).

The sources of practical Materia Medica are some 1,360 fragments of medical works from classic authors, Arabic physicians and pharmacists, and Jewish practitioners. An outstanding figure of the last category is al-Kuhin al-'Attar, on whom Leigh Chipman wrote her recent Ph.D. thesis. Other sources include practitioners' personal notebooks, letters, recipes (some 140 from the Taylor-Schechter collection), and inventories of or orders from pharmacists (pp. 20–26).

The authors succeeded in identifying 278 of the 298 names of drugs mentioned in the fragments dealing with prescriptions and lists of medicines, for which they deserve acknowledgment. Their previous expertise in field research on drugs used in the past and until present times in Palestine/Israel and in the Near East was no doubt of great help (pp. 32–33).

The arrangement of the entries is as follows: names of drugs in English, Latin, and Arabic; description and brief history; practical and theoretical use; trade, agriculture, and industry; and traditional use, particularly in the Middle East (pp. 35–36).

Among the 278 items registered, 224 are vegetal, 31 are mineral, and 23 are from animals.

The items of Materia Medica described cover no fewer than 419 pages (pp. 89–508). Appendices I and II feature alphabetical lists of drugs according to their practical and theoretical uses, divided into three sections: animal, inorganic, and plant material. This division could have been chosen, to my taste, for the detailed description as well. In these lists we find the number of times the drug is mentioned in the Genizah documents, a welcome detail indeed. Other appendices list compound medicines and drugs, foodstuffs, and more.

The bibliography is extensive, although I missed the names of Süssman Muntner, Elinor Lieber, and Helena Paavilainen. More than fifty color illustrations of excellent quality are a pleasure for the eye. There are several indexes covering names of drugs in Latin, Arabic, and English. One minor remark will be added. The authors quote Josephus (On Balm, p. 350): Jewish Antiquities VIII, 6: 6. This is an antiquated way of citing Josephus (it should be J. Ant. VIII, 174).

Be this as it may, this book is no doubt a milestone in the history of pharmacology on one side and in Genizah scholarship on the other side. [End Page 929]

Samuel S. Kottek
Jerusalem
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