Abdellatif Al Baghdadi
Tuesday, 01 April 2008
Abdellatif Al-Baghdadi was born in Baghdad(1162-1213):he studied philosophy and philology and chemistry and medicine. During his career he taught medicine and philosophy at Damascus, Aleppo and Cairo.
The Arabic manuscript now in the Bodleian Library was translated by Joseph White of Oxford in 1782 and published at Tubingen in 1789 under the title Abdolatiphi compendium
An Arabic Latin edition containing the Arabic text was published by J. White at the Clarendon Press in 1800; a good French translation appeared in Paris in 1810, and a German translation by Wahl was published at Halle in 1790; other editions of this work were by Hunt in 1746, Mousley 1808, and De Sacy in 1803.
It is important here to quote Briffault on a crucial aspect of scientific progress, in which Abdellatif has a role:
`Contrast that spirit of scientific minuteness and perseverance in observation (amongst the Muslims) with the speculative methods of the ancients who scorned mere empiricism; with Aristotle who wrote on physics without performing a single experiment, and on natural history without taking the trouble to ascertain the most easily verifiable facts, who calmly states that men have more teeth than women, while Galen, the greatest classical authority on anatomy, informs us that the lower jaw consists of two bones, a statement which is accepted unchallenged till 'Abdellatif takes the trouble to examine human skulls.'
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