As a matter of fact it is no such thing. This title, together with an extra title-page and colophon in the same hand, is a much later addition to the MS., which also has a fragment of some other medical work—at present unidentified—bound up with it. The folios of the MS. which deal with the Tractatus have been bound together in extreme disorder, but examination of them has shown that they really form a fragment of the second book of المختار قي الطبّ, the Delectus de Medicina, by مهذب الدين ابو الحسن على بن احهد البغدادي, Muhaḏḏib ed Din Abu’l Hasan Ali Ibn Aḥmad of Bagdad.[360]
Ibn Abi ‛Uṣaibia (1203–1269)[361] gives a life of this writer and a list of his works, which includes the Delectus de Medicina. According to him, Muhaḏḏib ed Din was born at Bagdad in A.H. 515 (= A.D. 1121), and after studying medicine and philosophy settled at Mosul. Later he became the physician of the Shah Arman, chieftain of Khalāt on Lake Van in Armenia, in whose service he amassed great wealth. He completed the Delectus at Mosul in the year A.H. 560 (= A.D. 1164), and died there in A.H. 610 (= A.D. 1213), with the reputation of being first physician of his time.
Another fragment of the same work of Muhaḏḏib ed Din, which includes most of the contents of the Bodleian MS., besides a good deal of material which has been lost from the latter, exists in the British Museum.[362] The Leyden Library contains a unique copy of the work in three books. This is claimed to be complete by the Catalogue of the library,[363] although Bar Hebraeus [1226–1286]—Catholicus of the Jacobite (Monophysite) Church[364]—says that the work ran into four parts.[365] The three books of the Leyden MS. treat (i) of generalities (i.e. Anatomy, Physiology, and the general causes of disease), (ii) of medicaments, and (iii) of particular diseases and their treatment.
The Bodleian and British Museum MSS. contain part of the third book, which was probably in general use by itself as a dictionary of medicine. The British Museum copy has only lost the earlier chapters of this third part, but the Bodleian MS., although possessing a few more chapters at the beginning, is far less complete in the other portions.[366]
Wüstenfeld and the bibliographers that followed him have evidently derived their information concerning these MSS. from the catalogues of the Bodleian Library and of the Bibliothèque Nationale. No mediaeval bibliographer has up to the present been found who mentions this book of Maimonides.[367] Wüstenfeld’s usual authority for his statements is the great thirteenth-century medical biographer, Ibn Abi ‘Uṣaibia. But, though the latter gives a life of the Hebrew physician and a list of his writings,[368] he makes no mention of the Tractatus de Causis et Indiciis Morborum. Moreover, this Tractatus has no place in Haji Khalfa’s admirable bibliography of Arabic works, which contains notices of four books bearing the title De Causis et Indiciis Morborum, not one of which is by Maimonides. Lastly, neither the historian Al Qifty in his Classes philosophorum et astronomorum et medicorum,[369] nor Bar Hebraeus, who is said to have plagiarized him,[370] notice the work in their sketches of the physician’s life.
The Bodleian MS. alleged to contain the Tractatus is one of a collection of over seven hundred volumes bequeathed to the library on his death, November 2, 1713, by Narcissus Marsh, Archbishop successively of Cashel, Dublin, and Armagh. Most of his Oriental MSS. had been procured for him either in the East by Robert Huntington, Bishop of Raphoe and chaplain to the English merchants at Aleppo, or at the sale of Golius’s library at Leyden in October 1696.[371] Golius was a Dutch orientalist, born at Leyden in 1596. He studied medicine and Oriental languages at the University of Leyden, and after leaving it he accompanied a French embassy to Morocco in 1622. He remained in Morocco for two years, and while there collected various MSS. On his return in 1624 he was appointed to the Chair of Arabic at Leyden, but was allowed a period of leave for travel in the East before taking up his appointment. He took with him a grant of money for the purchase of MSS., and these to the number of over two hundred are now deposited in the University Library at Leyden. On several occasions during his travels in Arabia attempts were made by Arab chiefs to detain him for his medical knowledge, but he returned safely and later wrote a number of works mainly concerned with Arabic. He died in 1667.
Among the MSS. which Golius himself procured for the Leyden Library was that of the Delectus. It is at least unlikely therefore that such a profound Arabist, who was also a medical man, would have bought the Bodley fragment for a genuine work of Maimonides; the primary responsibility for the error thus probably rests with Huntington. However that may be, it was Uri, in his catalogue of the Bodleian MSS., who first published the error, and from him it was passed on to the modern bibliographers.
John Uri was a Hungarian who had studied Oriental literature under Schultens at Leyden, and was recommended to Archbishop Secker for the purpose of cataloguing the Bodleian Oriental MSS., by Sir Joseph Yorke, then ambassador in the Netherlands.[372] Many years were occupied in the preparation of the work, which appears to have commenced in 1766 and was not completed till 1787. In spite of the length of time which Uri occupied in his task, his successor, Pusey, found sufficient errors in it to fill sixty closely printed pages. In his preface to the second volume of the Catalogue, issued in 1835,[373] Pusey complains ‘Urius vero MSS. haud raro negligenter exscripsit’, and says that on re-examination of Uri’s work he discovered, ‘besides the errors which Uri himself would have admitted, that nearly all the purchasers of these books, Pocock alone excepted, had had spurious works foisted on them by wily Orientals. He therefore looked through all the books which Uri had enumerated, excepting the more common ones, to see if they corresponded to their titles or not. By doing this he discovered various irregularities. In some cases the titles had been covered over with paper or obliterated with ink, or practically erased with a knife. In others, by slight changes in the authors’ names, more famous people were indicated as responsible for the works. Lastly, by changing the pagination in some of the volumes fragments were represented as complete works, and a few pages of one work were even occasionally sewn on at the beginning of another.’[374]
Uri’s errors will be the more readily condoned when it is remembered that he did not specialize on the Arabic MSS. alone, and that his work seeks to catalogue, for the first time, a two hundred years’ accumulation of Oriental MSS., including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Aethiopic, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Coptic writings. Nevertheless, Uri’s entry with reference to the present MS. deserves some of Pusey’s criticism. The MS. has three parts, each written in a different hand, the first and most important part being the supposed Tractatus de Causis et Indiciis Morborum, which covers folios 2–87. The second part is a fragment of some as yet unidentified medical work (folios 88–115); and the third, consisting of the first and last folios, gives us an introduction and an end piece to the first part.
The alleged author and translator are named on the first page: