The History of Medieval Medicine through Jewish Manuscripts
One of our favorite parts of Beyond Chicken Soup: Jews and Medicine in America exhibit has been the special loan of early Jewish medical manuscripts. If it’s one of your favorites too, then you’ll definitely want to check out this new, FREE, online course from the Penn Libraries! Our curator, Karen Falk, is hoping to do this class herself and share her thoughts, but we’d love to hear from you too!
Penn Libraries Announces New MOOC: “The History of Medieval Medicine through Jewish Manuscripts”
About the course:
This mini-course is a general introduction to both to medieval medicine and to the value of using manuscripts. Professor Y. Tzvi Langermann presents a case study that builds from a unique 15th-century volume in which three important medical manuscripts in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters) are sewn together. He will not only walk the student through the basics of medical knowledge training and practice in the Jewish Middle Ages and beyond, but he will also show how clues gleaned from the particular elements of a manuscript (such as marginal notes, mistakes, and handwriting) allow us to learn a great deal that we could not have gleaned from a pristine printed version. The course is made up of eight short video lectures (5-7 minutes each) that explore the fascinating highlights of an extraordinary manuscript.