The title in Arabic,
Uyūn ul-Anbāʾ fī Ṭabaqāt al-Aṭibbā (), is translatable loosely and expansively as "Sources of News on Classes of Physicians", commonly translated into English as
History of Physicians,
Lives of the Physicians,
Classes of Physicians, or
Biographical Encyclopedia of Physicians. The book opens with a summary of the physicians from ancient Greece, Syria, India and Rome but the main focus of the book's 700 pages is physicians of medieval Islam. A first version appeared in 1245–1246 and was dedicated to the
Ayyubid physician and vizier Amīn al-Dawlah. A second and enlarged recension of the work was produced in the last years of the life of the author, and circulated in at least two different versions, as shown by the extant manuscripts.
Editions The text has been published five times in all. When the first edition by
August Müller (Cairo, 1882), published under the pseudonym "Imrū l-Qays", was found to be marred by typos and errors and a corrected version was subsequently issued (Königsberg, 1884). Relying on Müller's work, Niẓār Riḍā published a non-critical edition of the text in Beirut in 1965, which was subsequently reworked by Qāsim Wahhāb for yet another edition issued in Beirut in 1997. ʿĀmir al-Najjār published his own critical edition (not based on Müller) in Cairo in 1996. A team of scholars from the universities of Oxford and Warwick has published a new critical edition and a full annotated English translation of the
Uyūn al-Anbā. Their work is available in
Open Access at
Brill Scholarly Editions. In 2020, a new translation was published by
Oxford World's Classics under the name
Anecdotes and Antidotes: A Medieval Arabic History of Physicians. ==See also==