(11) Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1912, pp. 136-166.  The Mesues also did great work, and translations of their compilations, particularly those of the younger Mesue, were widely distributed in manuscript and were early printed (Venice, 1471) and frequently reprinted, even as late as the seventeenth century.

Leclerc gives the names of more than one hundred known translators who not only dealt with the physicians but with the Greek philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers.  The writings of the physicians of India and of Persia were also translated into Arabic.

But close upon the crowd of translators who introduced the learning of Greece to the Arabians came original observers of the first rank, to a few only of whom time will allow me to refer.  Rhazes, so called from the name of the town (Rai) in which he was born, was educated at the great hospital at Bagdad in the second half of the ninth century.  With a true Hippocratic spirit he made many careful observations on disease, and to him we owe the first accurate account of smallpox, which he differentiated from measles.  This work was translated for the old Sydenham Society by W.A.  Greenhill (1848), and the description given of the disease is well worth reading.  He was a man of strong powers of observation, good sense and excellent judgment.  His works were very popular, particularly the gigantic “Continens,” one of the bulkiest of incunabula.  The Brescia edition, 1486, a magnificent volume, extends over 588 pages and it must weigh more than seventeen pounds.  It is an encyclopaedia filled with extracts from the Greek and other writers, interspersed with memoranda of his own experiences.  His “Almansor” was a very popular text-book, and one of the first to be printed.  Book ix of “Almansor” (the name of the prince to whom it was addressed) with the title “De aegritudinibus a capite usque ad pedes,” was a very favorite mediaeval text-book.  On account of his zeal for study Rhazes was known as the “Experimentator.”

The first of the Arabians, known throughout the Middle Ages as the Prince, the rival, indeed, of Galen, was the Persian Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, one of the greatest names in the history of medicine.  Born about 980 A. D. in the province of Khorasan, near Bokhara, he has left a brief autobiography from which we learn something of his early years.  He could repeat the Koran by heart when ten years old, and at twelve he had disputed in law and in logic.  So that he found medicine was an easy subject, not hard and thorny like mathematics and metaphysics!  He worked night and day, and could solve problems in his dreams.  “When I found a difficulty,” he says, “I referred to my notes and prayed to the Creator.  At night, when weak or sleepy, I strengthened myself with a glass of wine."(12) He was a voluminous writer to whom scores of books are attributed, and he is the author of the most famous medical text-book ever written.  It is safe to