ABSTRACT
In any case, my point for the moment is just to say that the manuscript preserved in the Tucci collection has as few as two rivals for the honour of being considered the earliest Tibetan work specifically devoted to medical history. It is always a danger to speak of ‘firsts’ in human history, of course, and I will not push this point further, just to admit that a number of obscure and fairly early medical history titles have been listed in the literature. If we limit ourselves to those that are available and known to us at the moment, we may say that three medical history texts survive from around the year 1200, and the next somehow available, even if not yet published, history dates about 200 years later. but then old medical histories continue to surface, including some that, while known to exist in the past, remained unavailable in recent times. as an example, we might point to olaf czaja’s recent article about a previously unavailable and still unpublished manuscript of a medical history by mtsho-smad mkhan-chen dated to the middle of the sixteenth century.4
