São Paulo – Arab manuscripts that were inaccessible to the public have been digitalized and made available on the Internet to whoever wants to view them. A project financed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) made it possible for three institutions to develop the method and put on the Internet documents dated from the 14th to 20th. The search may be in English or Arabic.
After two year’s work, researchers at Wellcome Library, in London, King’s College London and the Library of Alexandrina, in Egypt, created in July this year, a site with 500 Arab manuscripts and 75,000 images. Most of the documents discuss an area in which the Arabs advanced much from the end of the Roman Empire to the 15th century: medicine.
Viewers may see texts by doctor and philosopher Ibn Sinna (Avicenna), comments by other philosophers, like Averroes, medical poems by Avicenna and even philosophical and scientific works by anonymous researchers.
The digital consultancy director at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, Simon Tanner believes that these studies helped medicine evolve. He said they may be reused at any moment. After all, according to Tanner, laboratories frequently research ancient documents in search of names of herbs used in the past or of a “route” that may result in the discovery of new drugs and cures to diseases.
Press Release
Manuscript from the 14th century may be viewed
Manuscript from the 14th century may be viewed “Our modern world of medicine can be better understood when we understand the importance of the Arabic world to medicine. From the fall of Rome until the European Renaissance of the 15th century, the Islamic world was the centre of medical knowledge. Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world (many Arabic medicinal terms--drug, syrup, alcohol, alkali, etc.--remain in western languages) and these manuscripts hold important historical and scientific insights into that period,” said Tanner.
The 500 digitalized manuscripts belong to Wellcome Library. According to the institution, digitalizing documents is part of a greater project and comprehends other collections it owns. Some of the Arab documents include medical manuscripts that belonged to Lebanese physician and medical historian Sami Ibrahim Haddad (1890-1957) and include the “Haddad Manuscript Collection”. The collection also includes texts by Islamic authors like Al-Majusi, Ibn Sina and even Jewish authors who wrote in Arabic.
sumber dari: anba.com.br
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