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Maimonides, Medical Aphorisms 10-15
Maimonides, Medical Aphorisms, Treatises 10-15
Moshe ben Maimon, or Abū cImrān Mūsā ibn cUbayd Allāh, better knwon as Moses
Maimonides, is amongst the most celebrated rabbis in the history of Judaism and the author of works on many subjects. His
writings include influential philosophical and medical treatises in Arabic and two of the most important works on Jewish law.
He is perhaps best known for his effort to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with biblical teaching. Born in 1138 in
Córdoba, Spain, Maimonides eventually settled in Egypt, where he practiced medicine. He died in 1204.
Medical Aphorisms is undoubtedly the best known and most compendious of Maimonides' medical works. It consists of about
1,500 aphorisms culled mainly from the treatises of Galen, either as direct quotations or as summaries, and arranged into twenty-
five treatises. Most of the traditional medieval medical subspecialities are represented in this work, including anatomy,
physiology, gynecology, hygiene, and diet. In addition, Maimonides includes a section addressing unusual cases from Galen and
another another containing his own criticism of Galen's theories.
Medical Aphorisms, Treatises 10-15 is the third volume of a new critical edition of the Medical Aphorisms, with a
fresh, annotated English translation. The central subjects of the treatises are fevers, periods and crisis of a disease,
evacuation through bleeding, evacuation through purgatives and enemas, vomiting, and surgery. Most of these aphorisms are based
on the works of Galen. Because the source texts from which several of them were derived are no longer extant, these aphorisms
provide tantalizing clues about aspects of Galen's thought that are otherwise unknown. They thus serve as a window onto the
ancient medical theories of Galen as well as on the medieval practice of Maimonides.
The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides is a series edited by Gerrit Bos of the University of Cologne and published under the
auspices of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative at Brigham Young University's
Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship.
Maimonides,
Kitāb al-fuṣūl fī al-ṭibb (Medical Aphorisms, Treatises 10-15)
A parallel Arabic-English edition,
edited, translated, and annotated by Gerrit Bos
= The Medical Works of Moses Maimonides
Brigham Young University Press, Provo 2010.
119 pp., ISBN 978-0-8425-2780-4
