Description
Book SynopsisHousni Alkhateeb Shehada's Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam is the first comprehensive study of veterinary medicine, its practitioners and its patients in the medieval Islamic world, with special emphasis on the Mamluk period (1250-1517). Based on a large variety of sources, it is a history of a scientific field that is also examined from social and cultural perspectives. Horses, as well as birds of prey used for hawking and falconry, were at the centre of the veterinary literature of that period, but the treatment and cure of other animals was not totally neglected. The Mamluk period is presented here as the time when veterinary medicine reached its pinnacle in medieval Islam and often even surpassed human medicine.
Trade Review'Shehada’s work will remain the standard work on Islamic veterinarian medicine for years to come not only because of the rarity of the scholarship but also because of his overall thorough study of it. Scholars of medicine will find it intriguing, while Mamluk scholars or those who study the medieval Islamic world will be pleased with this nuanced studied of an often ignored aspect of life in the Mamluk Sultanate.' Timothy May, Dahlonega, Sudhoffs Archiv 101/1, 2017/
