• DOI:10.1086/354701
• Corpus ID: 33884974

Gleanings from an Arabist's Workshop: Current Trends in the Study of Medieval Islamic Science and Medicine

@article{SavageSmith1988GleaningsFA,
  title={Gleanings from an Arabist's Workshop: Current Trends in the Study of Medieval Islamic Science and Medicine},
  author={Emilie Savage‐Smith},
  journal={Isis},
  year={1988},
  volume={79},
  pages={246 - 266}
}

• E. Savage‐Smith
• Published 1 June 1988
• History
• Isis

The decade of the 1980s has seen an unprecedented growth of activity and maturity in the history of Islamic science and medicine. When compared with other areas of the history of science and medicine, however, the specialty may appear somewhat underdeveloped and antiquated.' Because the field has been slow to appreciate the methods and concerns of other historians, much of what has been published fails to interest a larger audience. An overriding concern with cataloguing and assessing manuscript sources as well as editing texts is immediately apparent from the bulk of recent publications. The field has been dominated by an interest in bibliography and sources of the sort that characterized ancient, medieval, and Renaissance studies in earlier generations; and to many historians today this focus on text and translation appears outdated. Part of the reason for this apparent backwardness and failure to reflect current historical trends is that the specialty is a relatively recent development, and scholars have not been able to profit (as have historians of ancient Western science, for example) from large quantities of edited texts and catalogues prepared in earlier generations. In fact, despite the recent increase in published texts and translations, the major medieval scientific and medical treatises, usually quite lengthy, still await reliable translations and editions, and a great deal of potentially important material lies unexamined except, perhaps, by a cataloguer who duly noted the title. It is difficult for a nonspecialist to appreciate that the percentage of written sources in this historical discipline that have been studied is actually quite small, for the field comprehends an area extending from Spain to Western India and a time span of at least nine centuries. In these circumstances, attention to the location and content of materials is not unreasonable, and since most of these medieval written sources tend to be formal treatises or manuals compiled for private use, the application of quantitative methods, so much a part of modern historical scholarship, is largely inappropriate. The specialty has also been plagued by the difficulties of the languages involved (Arabic, Persian, and Turkish), which both discourage people from entering the field and serve as a barrier to nonspecialists. To counterbalance this tendency of the area to become isolated, it is especially incumbent upon everyone working in it to minimize the problems facing the nonspecialist. For example, standardizing the forms of names and the systems of transliteration would