Medical Vocabulary

This Judeo-Arabic medical work is in the form of an alphabetical list of medicinal ingredients. Works like this were accessible reference tools for physicians who needed to find ingredients for use in compounding remedies. As can be seen from these excerpts, the author identifies the ingredients (here, scammony, sugar, and sumac), their qualities (hot, cold, dry, moist), possible benefits and side effects, and how they may be used in medicine. Some of the information in this text parallels that in Ibn Sīnā’s influential medical text, the Canon of Medicine. Unbracketed ellipses indicate lacunae in the manuscript.