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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2000;284:296.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Although many researchers have been racing to post on the World Wide Web the latest information from the Human Genome Project, snippets from ancient medical texts depicting an earlier view of human biology are also making their way into cyberspace.

An illuminated opening from The Canon of Medicine, made in Iran, probably at the beginning of the 15th century. (Photo credit: National Library of Medicine)

The National Library of Medicine, which has one of the three greatest collections of Islamic medical manuscripts in the world (the others are at Oxford University in England and Dar al-Kutub, the National Library in Cairo, Egypt), recently unveiled its illustrated online catalog of these manuscripts. The documents, which include Arabic translations of Hippocrates and Galen, also describe a variety of conditions that Islamic physicians sought to understand and treat, from hemorrhoids to forgetfulness.

The collection can be viewed at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/arabichome.html. . . [Full Text of this Article]