Acknowledgements
A Literary History of Medicine has been an enormous project encompassing a wide range of topics, and so it is inevitable that we are indebted to many people for their kind and generous assistance.
Foremost, of course, is the financial support provided by the Wellcome Trust and the institutional support given by the University of Oxford and the University of Warwick. The Oriental Institute provided meeting rooms when we held group meetings of the entire team, as did St Cross College, which also provided some very nice lunches for us. St John’s College as well as St Cross College on occasion provided accommodation for members of the team coming from overseas. In Oxford, the management of the Wellcome grant was very efficiently conducted by the financial officers at the Oriental Institute, Stephanie Yoxall and Chris Williams, and the everyday but essential needs of the project were aided by the ever-cheerful assistance of Trudi Pinkerton. For the Warwick portion of the Wellcome Trust grant, Katie Klaassen, Colette Kelly, and Fiona Slater have all helped with various organizational requirements.
The IT assistance of Daniel Burt, Computing Officer at The Khalili Research Centre, was essential to the coordination of a project in which members of the team were based on different continents. We could not have managed without him. He also was responsible for drawing up the map that accompanies this publication.
The team is indebted to Dr Peter Starr, Istanbul, for obtaining copies of Istanbul manuscripts, particularly the precious Süleymaniye, Şehid Ali Paşa MS 1923, but others as well. Professor Amr Abd al-Aziz Moneer, Egypt, assisted us greatly by obtaining copies of the edition by ʿĀmir al-Najjār printed in Cairo.
Professor Dimitri Gutas, of Yale University, provided invaluable advice about Avicenna, while Dr Yossef Rapoport, Queen Mary University of London, helped us with some obscure place names and terms for the Copts of Lower Egypt. Professor Richard Sorabji, King’s College London, assisted us in interpreting a number of complicated philosophical arguments, while Professor Gerrit Bos, Universität zu Köln, provided assistance with some terminology and the biography of Maimonides. Professor Charles Burnett, of the Warburg Institute in London, gave us references to various important publications, and the identification of certain foodstuffs was aided by suggestions from Professor David Waines, of Lancaster University. Dr Uwe Vagelpohl, University of Warwick, has provided excellent advice on all aspects of Greco-Arabic medical history.
Closer to home, Professor Sebastian Brock, of the Oriental Institute in Oxford, was very helpful in sorting out sources for Melkite physicians, and Nigel Wilson, of Lincoln College, University of Oxford, helped us identify some obscure Greek names. There are, of course, others who have also helped with various points, and those kind people will be mentioned in the course of the annotations to the translation.
The Bodleian Library, as always, provided access to many manuscript and print resources that were required, and Dr. Gillian Evison, Keeper of the Oriental Collections, aided the project greatly by allowing a sabbatical leave for Alasdair Watson, thus enabling him to participate in this project.
For the ‘public engagement’ part of the project – titled ‘Medieval Medicine in Board and Card Games’, also supported by the Wellcome Trust – the History of Science Museum here in Oxford was an essential partner. We are indebted to the support of its Director, Dr Silke Ackermann, as well as to the Administrator, Christina Lee. The project was designed and coordinated by Daniel Burt, himself an experienced board-game designer, in collaboration with the Lead Education Officer at the History of Science Museum, Chris Parkin. They were then joined for the duration of the project by Susannah (Sukie) Trowles, part-time education officer. The project produced four working prototypes of board games or card games for a range of age groups from Primary School age to Adult. Through these board and card games, it is intended that the players learn of some of the physicians and their medical care that Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah describes in his large history of medicine.
We also wish to thank Luciana O’Flaherty, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics, for undertaking to include in this prestigious series a volume of selections from Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah’s Best Accounts. Henrietta Sharp Cockrell made the selections and annotated them for a general reader; we are indebted to her for the extraordinary amount of work she put into this paperback volume that we hope will bring Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah and his Best Accounts to a larger audience.
Throughout the project, we have been able to work with the knowledge that our efforts will be brought into print by Brill and set at a very high standard. We thank Kathy van Vliet-Leigh, Acquisitions Editor for Middle East, Islam & South and Central Asian Studies, and the editors of the Handbook of Oriental Studies series for making this possible. Moreover, they have allowed us to have within these volumes all the material that we felt was required for a full presentation of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah’s Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians. The open access version of A Literary History of Medicine has been underwritten by the Wellcome Trust so as to enable Brill to present the volumes as a single XML online reference work, making it possible for all the volumes to be searched in a single online search. We also wish to thank Pieter te Velde for his meticulous guidance of these volumes through production.
We close this acknowledgment list by again thanking the Wellcome Trust, who have generously supported our project at every stage of the way. Without their continuous support, the project could not have been carried out.