The Brain in the Islamicate Tradition

In this lecture, I will discuss the very few, yet thought-provoking, visual representations of the brain and its ventricles in the medieval Islamicate tradition. Some illustrations of the brain show up in the Avicennan tradition, while numerous mini diagrams of the ventricles of the brain show up in the Kitāb al-Manṣūrī fi al-Ṭibb by al-Rāzī (865–925 CE) — a concise yet comprehensive and influential encyclopedia of medicine.

In several manuscript witnesses of this work numerous anatomical diagrams can be seen of the ventricles of the brain. These diagrams were not necessarily meant to copy reality or precise anatomy, and were most probably executed by the scribe/copyist of the text.

What is particularly intriguing is the variation in the visual representation of these anatomical structures. In other words, these diagrams qua “imagetexts” were subject to mouvance, i.e. accidental or deliberate changes, just like the text that was hand-copied from one manuscript to the other.

I argue that certain philological questions can be posed to these diagrams; for instance, questions pertaining to the familial relationship of the manuscript witnesses.

At the intersection of codicology and philology, I explore the usefulness of the family tree metaphor (stemma codicum) in establishing the relationship of various manuscripts based on the visual affinities of their respective diagrams. I ask to what extent the establishment of anatomical truth and reconstructing the archetype needs to be the focus, versus the exploration of the dynamism of visual representation as a result of scribal practices across time and space.