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PubMed1995

[The first treatise on diet: the Kitāb Hawāss al-agdiyah de Yūhannā ibn Māsawayh].

The article presents the first treatise concerning dietetics, written in Arabic in the first half of the IX century by one of the most ancient doctors of Bagdād, Yūhannā ibn Māsawayh, known in the western world as Jean Mésué. Ibn Māsawayh, basing his work on Galen's Properties of Foods, describes the properties of 140 foodstuffs from the vegetable and animal kingdom, and their good or bad effects on the human body. The translation of this treatise has been made from the only manuscript surviving, in the National Library of Madrid.

Arab World↗

PubMed1982

[Not Available].

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History of Medicine↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[The aphorisms of Yuhanna ibn Masawaih, physician of the Calif Haroun al-Rashid, and their diffusion to the West].

Jean Mésué, a Nestorian scholar, who practised and taught medicine in Bagdad in the tenth century, composed, besides numerous other works, an anthology of aphorisms, the dissemination of which was really extraordinary. There were 132 aphorisms concerning diseases and their treatment according to the doctor and the patients; some of them expressing home truths still valid today. From the East, Jean Mésué's aphorisms passed to the West where they met with amazing good luck, since the two Latin translations and the French translation were copied, then printed many times from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. It is the history of the handing down of this Arabian medical work that the author proposes to retrace in his communication.

Aphorisms and Proverbs as Topic↗