PREFACE In the course of the last ten years there have been conferred upon me two public honours which have given me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction, my election in 1911 as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and the presentation, on the occasion of my fifty-ninth birthday in February, I 82 I, of a complimentary address accompanied by very beautiful presents signed by a number of representative Persians, expressing their appreciation of the services which, they were kind enough to say, I had rendered to their language and literature. I hope that this little book may be regarded, not as a discharge, but as an acknowledgment, of this double debt. In it I have sought on the one hand to indicate the part played by the scholars and physicians of IslAm, and especially of Persia, in the transmission of medical science through the dark ages from the decline of the ancient to the rise of the modern learning and on the other to suggest to lovers of Arabic and Persian literature...