by Jack Lynch
We know more about Avicenna than about most other early compilers of reference books thanks, first, to an autobiography he wrote covering his first thirty years, and then to a biographical sketch written shortly after his death by his friend and disciple al-Juzjani. We know, for instance, that he was born in Afshana, the son of a high-ranking civil servant. Afshana was near the Persian region of Bukhara, the capital of the Persian Samanid dynasty and a great center of learning in the Islamic world. We know, too, that he was mostly self-educated. His father provided him with tutors, but he soon left them behind. By the time he was ten he had memorized the Qur’an; by the age of sixteen, he had learned everything his tutors had to teach him.
Having finished with the course of instruction his teachers had for him, he turned his attention to natural science, metaphysics, and medical theory. He studied Greek logic and mathematics with particular interest. He read Plato, Galen, the Stoics, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and Euclid’s Elements, as well as Arabic philosophers such as al-Farabi and Abu Abdallah al-Natili. Most of all, though, he read Aristotle, and especially the Metaphysics. At last he found something that challenged him. Having learned the Greek language, he read the original text, trying to make sense of it by reading an Arabic commentary by al-Farabi. He read the book forty times, attempting over and over to plumb its depths. In the words of philosophy professor Coeli Fitzpatrick, “Avicenna’s persistence and self-discipline in learning were legendary.”6
TITLE: Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb
COMPILER: Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina (c. 980–1037)
ORGANIZATION: Book 1, humoral theory; book 2, “simples” and method; books 3–4, pathology; book 5, compounding medicines
PUBLISHED: 1025
VOLUMES: 14
TOTAL WORDS: 1 million
Writings on medicine were always among those he read most attentively. Even as a teenager he claimed to have read every medical book available in late tenth-century Persia. From theory he turned to practice. Avicenna began treating the ill, and he rapidly developed a reputation as a physician. This reputation reached the very top of the social hierarchy in 997, when Nuh ibn Mansur, Sultan of Bukhara, appointed him one of his personal physicians. Avicenna was just sixteen or seventeen. The time in Mansur’s service was a revelation: Avicenna now had access to the whole of the sultan’s library. The voracious reader made his way through the entire collection by the time he was eighteen. Later in life he reflected, “I now know the same amount as then but more maturely and deeply; otherwise the truth of learning and knowledge is the same.”7 In his own writings, he combined Greek and Islamic thought, and he organized classical knowledge into a system that made sense in a Muslim context.
Avicenna wrote two major books on medicine. One, the Kitab al-Shifa, or Book of Healing, is a wide-ranging meditation on the health of the mind. The other, Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb, or The Canon of Medicine, is much more encyclopedic in its organization. Its fourteen volumes and more than a million words, densely packed with information, were compiled at Isfahan. It is an avowedly eclectic book, combining Galenic medicine, from second-century Greece, with older Aristotelian science and modern Islamic medicine. Avicenna’s interest in reconciling Greek and Arabic thought shows up even in his title: the Arabic word qanun is borrowed from the Greek kanon ‘measuring rod’, meaning “rule” or “standard.” But Avicenna drew from even more distant sources, including Indian medical theory and the Zhubing Yuanhuo Lun, an early seventh-century Chinese medical work. He has been praised for his clarity, his arrangement of information for maximal usefulness, and his ability to express complicated matters in the most concise way possible.
“Medicine,” Avicenna wrote in his preface, “is a science from which one learns the status of the human body with respect to what is healthy and what is not, in order to preserve good health when it exists and restore it when it is lacking.”8 The first book brings Greek medicine to bear on the basic principles of anatomy, health, and illness. The four humors—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—were introduced and linked to the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. Disease emerges from an imbalance of the humors, usually because of some obstruction. To bring them into balance, he prescribed “emetics, cathartics, enemas, sedatives, and other drugs, bleeding, blistering, and cauterization.”9
The second book moves on to “simples,” the basic medicines that are not compounded of multiple ingredients, and it spells out Avicenna’s conception of what we have come to call the scientific method. Book 3 explores pathology, with a systematic overview of twenty-one bodily organs or systems, while book 4 looks at other sorts of pathologies that span the entire body. This is the part that also introduces the rudiments of surgery. Finally, book 5 provides advice on compounding simples into more sophisticated medicines. Some have called it “the first pharmacopeia,” with its discussion of more than 760 medicines.10
A medical historian writes of the book’s “practical tenor”: “Ibn Sina’s intent, all too successful, was to give practitioners ready guidelines for immediate application, without too much worry over theory, and with a minimum of skeptical doubt or radical experimentation.”11 Another describes how the book works as a reference source:
If one wishes to use the Canon as a reference tool, the arrangement … works well for some subjects… . One can, for example, relatively easily find an answer to any of the following questions: When and in what conditions is bleeding an appropriate treatment? What are the medicinal powers of cinnamon? What treatments are recommended for deafness? For various kinds of fevers? How is theriac compounded?12
The Qanun is less useful, though, in its anatomical discussions, which are scattered throughout the book and therefore ill-suited to quick reference.
Expectations about medical knowledge were very different a thousand years ago. We now demand our medical textbooks be as up-to-date as possible, but Avicenna, like most writers of his time, demanded ancient authority. “The Qanun,” one scholar explains, “remains a compendium largely of traditional material.”13 Avicenna, for instance, leaned heavily on Galen, whose work was eight centuries old when Avicenna wrote—and even Galen was mostly backward-looking at the time he wrote. Still, Avicenna made some conceptual breakthroughs that are now a standard part of medical thinking. Medicines, for instance, Avicenna argued, should be tested before they are tried—“The experiment must be done on a single, not a composite, condition. In the latter case, if the condition consists of two opposite diseases and the drug is tried and found beneficial in both, we cannot infer the real cause of the cure”—an anticipation of what would become the clinical trial. Predating later medical thought, he suggested that tiny organisms might be responsible for illnesses centuries before science offered a germ theory. He called for explicit attention to observation and experimentation, and he believed in treating the whole patient, integrating body and mind into one concern, making him a forerunner of modern medical practice, including the field of psychiatry.
In fact Avicenna is a forerunner of much later medical thinking. He wrote in Arabic, but the Qanun eventually made its way into many of the world’s languages, including Persian, Latin (Gerard of Cremona rendered it as Canon medicinæ), Chinese (Huihui yaofang, or Prescriptions of the Hui Nationality), and Hebrew, as well as most of the major languages of Europe. It continued to be used—not as a work of antiquarian interest, but as a real medical reference—even into the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Europe. Even today, some practitioners of alternative traditional medicine in the Middle East turn to Avicenna for practical guidance. The Qanun, in the words of one historian, “might be called the most famous medical textbook ever written, and it was retranslated and reprinted in Europe down to the middle of the seventeenth century… . Of all the great characters of history Avicenna has an especial interest to medical men.”14
Bald and Avicenna probably lived within a few decades of each other, but they never knew of each other’s exist
ence. England and Persia were, for all practical purposes, on opposite sides of the world. But they were engaging in the same enterprise, trying to incorporate the best thinking about medical practice from ancient and foreign sources into their own domestic system. For Bald that meant Latin and Byzantine prescriptions; for Avicenna it meant ancient Greek medical theory. And both chose the form of the reference book in which to advance their syncretic conception of medicine, because it was the most reliable way to translate theory into practice. It is a valuable reminder that encyclopedias can be the site of important cross-cultural dialogue.
CHAPTER 6 ½
PLAGIARISM
The Crime of Literary Theft
Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ (Treasure-House of the Roman and British Tongue), a Latin–English dictionary, appeared in 1573. Shortly afterward, the Puritan pamphleteer known as Martin Marprelate turned his guns on Cooper, accusing him of plagiarism—of lifting entries without acknowledgment from Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary, Robert Estienne’s French dictionary, and John Frisius’s German dictionary. And he was right: Cooper had resorted to the pastiche for which teachers castigate dishonest students who think “research” means cutting and pasting from the World Wide Web.
Cooper might have defended himself by pointing out that dictionaries always “borrow” from one another. It has been going on from the beginning: as Sidney Landau puts it, “The history of English lexicography”—and it is just as true of other languages and other reference genres—“consists of a recital of successive and often successful acts of piracy.”1 Even the first monolingual English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604), has been accused of plagiarism. It is hard to imagine how a work that is the first of its kind can steal from predecessors when it has no predecessors, but around half the headwords in Cawdrey’s book were taken from a table of difficult words in The Englishe Schole-Maister, published by Edmund Coote eight years earlier. Cawdrey got his comeuppance when another lexicographer, John Bullokar, copied many of Cawdrey’s entries for his English Expositor. Cawdrey’s son then revised his father’s dictionary, stealing entries back from Bullokar.
One of England’s more bloodthirsty lexicographical rivalries began in 1656, when Thomas Blount published the biggest English dictionary to date, Glossographia. Two years later a dictionary called A New World of English Words appeared, compiled by Edward Phillips, nephew of the great poet John Milton. Phillips’s title picks up on some of the excitement surrounding the discovery of the real New World, which was still a comparatively novel subject in 1658. But Phillips found himself in trouble because his New World of English Words was not actually all that new—many of the entries were lifted straight out of Glossographia. Blount, unamused, responded with a deliciously nasty pamphlet, A World of Errors Discovered in the New World of Words. “Must this then be suffered?” Blount asked.
A Gentleman … writes a Book, and the Book happens to be acceptable to the World and sell; a Book-seller … instantly employs some Mercenary to jumble up another like Book out of this, with some Alterations and Additions, and give it a new Title… . Thus it fared with my Glossographia, the fruit of above Twenty years spare hours.2
Blount insisted that Phillips’s dictionary was “extracted almost wholly out of mine” and claimed that wherever Phillips added original material, he made it worse. It recalls a putdown often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but not actually spoken by him: “Sir, your book is both good and original. But the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.” Phillips must have smarted when he was smacked by Blount, but he was not improved by the scolding: in later editions he continued to pillage other dictionaries, including some that had criticized his first edition.
Such pilfering was not limited to England. In 1607, for instance, the Frenchman César Oudin published his Trésor des deux langues françoise et espagnole, a French–Spanish dictionary. Two years later the French section was lifted by Hierosme Victor, who used it in his Tesoro de las tres lenguas, francesa, italiana y española.3 And in the nineteenth century, the two most important American lexicographers—Noah Webster and Joseph Emerson Worcester—spent years accusing each other of thievery.
What seems strangest to moderns is that some reference book compilers were happy to confess their plagiarisms. When Robert James published the proposals for his Medicinal Dictionary in 1741, he gave would-be subscribers a quick overview of the competition, then: “Their Attempts were indeed useful, and are therefore to be mentioned with Gratitude.” The authors of other medical reference works “have succeeded so well,” he wrote, “that often nothing can be added to the Accuracy of their Expositions; and such Passages we have carefully translated”—translated in its etymological sense of “carried over”—without even any “unnecessary Variations” in the prose. Having lifted all the good parts from the earlier medical dictionaries, James believed his book “will probably make them less necessary to future Students,” and “what is not to be found in this Dictionary, it will be generally in vain to seek in any other.”4
Although the word “plagiarism” is ancient—it comes from Latin plagiarius ‘kidnapper’—the idea that lifting someone else’s words might be wrong is modern. Medieval writers would not have understood the charge: for centuries, writers (and painters and sculptors and composers) were encouraged to copy the masters as closely as possible. Only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did a notion of intellectual property become current, so that Samuel Johnson could define plagiary in 1755 as “A thief in literature; one who steals the thoughts or writings of another” and “The crime of literary theft.”
Today, getting caught brandishing scissors and paste can be enough to ruin a career. And yet every reference book writer spends a lot of time looking over rivals’ shoulders. As lexicologist Sidney Landau points out in one of the best overviews of dictionaries, that is almost certainly a good thing:
Some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lexicographers publicly acknowledged their indebtedness to specific predecessors. Sad to say, very few twentieth-century lexicographers have done so. The pressures of the marketplace dictate that every dictionary be “new.” A really new dictionary would be a dreadful piece of work, missing innumerable basic words and senses, replete with absurdities and unspeakable errors, studded with biases and interlarded with irrelevant provincialisms.5
CHAPTER 7
NEW WORLDS
Cartography in an Age of Discovery
Abraham Ortelius
Theatrum orbis terrarum
1570
Johann Bayer
Uranometria
1603
Scientific cartography took a great step backward in the early Christian world. The Greeks had done sophisticated scientific calculations on the size and shape of the earth, and Islamic geographers were mapping the extremities of the known world. In Christendom, though, the cartographic enterprise was much less energetic. People who believed that all the answers could be found in the Bible also believed that calculation and observation were unnecessary. Cosmas Indicopleustes, a merchant and traveler, published a map in his Aigyptiou Manachou Christianike Topographia (Christian Topography, around 540 C.E.) that rendered a flat earth with far more attention to the position of Eden than the position of the Scilly Isles. All his evidence was from the Bible. He had no truck with “the miserable Pagan belief that earth and heaven are spherical.” “What can be more absurd,” he asked, “than the Pagan doctrine? … The Pagans are at war with divine Scripture.”1 Not until 1410 did one of the ancient works of geography reenter European consciousness, when a Latin version of Ptolemy’s Geographike hyphegesis turned up. For the next century, Europeans were busy both rediscovering ancient knowledge about the world and discovering other things for the first time.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, as Europe underwent the cultural changes known collectively as the Renaissance, both the intellectual and the physical world got bi
gger. It was the great age of exploration, when European powers set out across the oceans and discovered that the world was many times larger than their predecessors had imagined. Abraham Ortelius’s Theatre of the World described the globe early in the age of European expansion, while Johann Bayer’s catalog of the stars was the result of a different kind of exploration taking place around the same time.
After being neglected for centuries, the best cartographic works of antiquity were resurrected in the fifteenth century and discovered to be compatible with Christian understandings of the world. Ptolemy’s Geography was a newfound favorite; even Pope Pius II wrote a commentary on it, and his successor Julius II commissioned wall maps in the Loggia del Cosmografia in the Vatican.2 The Geography was first printed in 1475, and six editions appeared across Europe in the next quarter century, many of them supplemented with new maps of regions the ancient geographer never dreamed of.
The fifteenth century was also the beginning of Europe’s great age of exploration. Diego de Silves discovered the Azores in 1427, Portuguese explorers found Cape Verde in 1446, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, Christopher Columbus spied land in 1492, John Cabot landed in Newfoundland in 1497, and Amerigo Vespucci identified the Amazon in 1499. All of their discoveries were added to the best maps of the ancients, and brand-new maps were constantly being drawn. One of the greatest cartographers of the early sixteenth century was Gerardus Mercator, known as the “Ptolemy of his time.” He was born in Rupelmonde, in modern Belgium, and educated in Brabant. Mercator earned a living producing scientific and mathematical instruments, and in the mid-1530s he and some associates produced a globe. Mercator was involved because of his talent as an engraver, but he soon demonstrated a cartographic knack, and he began making his own maps in 1537, starting with views of the Holy Land and moving on a year later to a world map. As a friend of Mercator put it, his European map “attracted more praise from scholars everywhere than any similar geographical work which has ever been brought out.”3 It was a new era for cartography.