[46] Also written Paulus Aeginetes.
[47] The account which is given in this and the following chapters is based largely on Dr. Lucien Le Clerc’s Histoire de la Médecine Arabe, Paris, 1876.
[48] Le Clerc and Freind mention both Nishapur and Djondisabour as the name of the capital of the Province of Khorassan in northeast Persia.
[49] The drachma was a silver coin worth about 9¾ pence English money. The fee paid to Gabriel for his surgical services amounted, therefore, to a little less than £2000 or $10,000.
[50] To distinguish him from Mesué the Younger, who lived at Cairo, Egypt, about one hundred years later, and who attained considerable celebrity on account of the treatises which he wrote on materia medica.
[51] For further remarks concerning the origin of the Teïssir see page 229.
[52] According to tradition the medical school at Salerno was founded by four physicians—Adela, an Arab; Helinus, a Jew; Pontus, a Greek; and Salernus, a Latin.
[53] Perhaps the French title “sage-femme” originated from this.
[54] There can be no question, says Neuburger (in agreement with Daremberg), about the truth of the statement that Constantinus allowed the authorship of several of the treatises issued at Salerno under his name to be attributed to himself—as, for example, the “Liber Pantegni” (Pantechni), which is in reality the “Liber Regalis” of Haly Abbas; the “Pieticum,” which is fundamentally the work of Ibn-al-Dschezzar; the “De Oculis,” which is based upon Honein ben Ischak’s treatise on opthalmology; and still other works which it is not necessary to specify.
[55] Under the heading “Epilogus” on pages 268 and 269 of Meaux Saint-Marc’s version.