Background
Ibn Abi Usaibia was born at Damascus, a descendant of the Banu Khazraj tribe and the son of a physician, and studied medicine at Damascus and Cairo.
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Ibn Abi Usaibia
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The title has been put into English as History of Physicians. His full name was Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa Muʾaffaq al-Dīn Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad Ibn First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Qāsim Ibn Khalīfa al-Khazrajī. In 1236 he was appointed physician to a new hospital in Cairo, but he surrendered the appointment the following year to take up a post given him by the ruler of Damascus in Salkhad near that city.
There he lived and died.
His only suriving work is In that work he mentions another work written by himself, but it has not survived. The early chapters are almost wholly about the physicians of ancient Greece.
There are also chapters on Syriac and Indian physicians. A first version appeared in 1245-1246 and was dedicated to the vizier of Damascus.
A second and enlarged version was produced by the same author, though it is uncertain whether the new version was made public in the lifetime of the author
Editions
In year 1884 an edition was published in Arabic curated by August Müller (Königsberg, 1884). Today the Arabic text is online at AlWaraq.net and elsewhere. A full translation into English is at Tertullian.org.
