Ibn Butlan

Ibn Butlan ( Arabic ابن بطلان; with full name Abu l-Hasan al-Muchtar ibn al-Hasan ibn ʿAbdun ibn Saʿdun ibn Butlan  /أبو الحسن المختار بن الحسن بن عبدون بن سعدون بن بطلان / Abū l-Ḥasan al-Muḫtār bin al-Ḥasan bin ʿAbdūn bin Saʿdūn bin Buṭlān ; *? Baghdad ; † around 1065 in Antioch ), also known as Elluchasem Elimithar , was an Iraqi Christian ( Nestorian ) doctor and author of the medical work Taqwim es-sihha  /تقويم الصحة / taqwīm eṣ-ṣiḥḥa .

Ibn Butlan and two of his students. Author's picture from the Vienna Tacuinum Sanitatis, fol. 4. recto (1390)

Life

Abu l-Hassan Ibn Butlan was a pupil of Ibn at-Tayyib († 1043), a Christian monk in Baghdad , who later became the presbyter of the Assyrian Church of the East, also known as the Nestorian, and secretary of the Patriarch Elias I. Butlan exchanged several pamphlets with the Egyptian doctor Ali ibn Ridwan and visited him personally in Cairo after stays in Mosul , Dijar Bekr and Aleppo . He then traveled via Constantinople to Antioch, where he finally entered a monastery and there he wrote the Taqwim as-sihha (Latin: Tacuinum sanitatis in medicina ; German later also Chestboards of Health ) and other healing works during the last years of his life. He died around 1064.

aftermath

The doctor must have been extremely popular in Aleppo, because over a hundred years later the Syrian emir Usama mentioned anecdotes about Butlan in his autobiography . Nine Arabic manuscripts and 17 translations into Latin of his main work Taqwim as-sihha have survived . The translator is unknown, but the client was King Manfred of Sicily (13th century). Today, numerous abbreviated illustrated versions are known that are based on this translation.

Different spellings of the name are: Elbochasim de Baldach (Baldach is Middle Latin for Baghdad), Ububchasym de Baldach, Elluchasem Elimithar, Albulkasem de Baldac. These are abbreviations or unsuccessful translations.

Writings, editions and translations

• Tacuini sanitatis Elluchasem Elimithar medici de Baldath de sex rebus non naturalibus, earum naturis, operationibus et rectificationibus […] recens exarati. Hans Schott, Strasbourg 1531. Digitized Ub Düsseldorf Digitized MDZ ; German translation:
  • Michael Herr: Chess boards of Gesuntheyt. Hans Schott, Strasbourg 1533; Reprint Darmstadt around 1970; Reprint Weinheim ad Bergstrasse / Leipzig 1988 (with an afterword by Marlit Leber and Elfriede Starke).
• Tacuinum sanitatis in medicina: Codex Vindobonensis series nova 2644 of the Austrian National Library , I-II, annotated, transcribed and translated into German. by Franz Unterkircher, with an English translation of the Latin text by Heide Saxe and Charles H. Talbot, Graz 1967
• Das Ärztebankett , Stuttgart: Hippokrates Verlag 1984 ISBN 3-7773-0640-1 .
• Adalberto Pazzini, Emma Pirani: Original captions by Ububchasym de Baldach Herbarium, natural remedies from a medieval manuscript. New York 1980.

literature

• Friedrun R. Hau: Ibn Buṭlān. In: Werner E. Gerabek et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of medical history. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 223 ( limited preview in the Google book search)
• Dorothee Rippmann : Body and Senses in the Art of Cooking. Concepts of medieval food dietetics . In: Werner M. Egli, Ingrid Tomkowiak (Ed.): Sinn , Zürich (Chronos Verlag) 2010, p. 167-196.
• Dorothee Rippmann: The body in balance. Nutrition and Health in the Middle Ages . In: Medium Aevum Quotidianum 52, Krems 2005, pp. 20-45.
• Lawrence I. Conrad: Ibn Butlan in Bilas al Sham. The Career of a Traveling Christian Physician . In: David Thomas (ed.): Syrian Christians under Islam. The first thousand years , Leiden / Boston / Cologne. 2001, pp. 131-158.
• Lawrence I. Conrad: The Arab-Islamic Tradition . In: The Western Medical Tradition 800 BC to AD 1800 , Cambridge, University Press, 1995, p. 93-138.
• Lawrence I. Conrad: Scholarship and social context: a medical case from the eleventh-century Near East , In: Donald G. Bates (dir.), Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 84-100.
• Luisa Cogliati Arano: Tacuinum sanitatis , Munich 1976.
• The house book of the Cerruti. Based on the manuscript in the Austrian National Library . Translation from Latin and afterword by Franz Unterkircher, Dortmund, Harenberg Kommunikation, 1979.
• Hosam Elkhadem: Le "Taqwim al-sihha" (Tacuini sanitatis) d 'Ibn Butlan: Un traité médical du XIe siècle. Histoire du texte, édition critique, traduction, commentaire (Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres, Fonds René Draguet, vol. 7), Leuven, Belgium, Aedibus Peeters, 1990.
• Norbert Höller (ed.): “Schachtafelen der Gesuntheyt” by Ibn Butlan, transcription of the Schachtafeln der Gesundheit, edition of the German translation by Michael Herr, Strasbourg, Schott, 1533, = website “Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica”, ed. by Thomas Gloning, University of Gießen / D.
• Danielle Jacquart: The influence of Arabic medicine in the medieval West . In: Roshdi Rashed (ed.): Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science , London, Routledge, 1996, vol. 3, p. 963-984.
• Carmélia Opsomer-Halleux: L'art de vivre en santé. Images et recettes du Moyen âge, Le "Tacuinum sanitatis" (ms 1061) de la Bibliothèque de l'Université de Liège , Liège 1991.
• Daniel Poirion, Claude Thomasset: L'art de vivre au moyen âge. Codex Vindobonensis Series Nova 2644 conservé à la Bibliothèque Nationale d'Autriche , Paris 1995.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ibn Butlan in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ibn Butlan: The doctors' banquet , trans. from the Arabic v. Felix Klein-Franke, Stuttgart 1984 (PDF, 70 kB)
• Ibn Butlan's health tablets

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ferdinand Wüstenfeld: History of the Arab Doctors and Natural Scientists . Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1840, p. 78.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Tacuinum sanitatis in medicina - Glanzlichter der Buchkunst , Volume 13. Commentary by Franz Unterkircher. Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, Graz 2004, ISBN 3-201-01831-7 , p. 8 f.