ABSTRACT
The novel availability of editions or transcriptions of medical writings associated with hospitals in the medieval Middle East makes possible something that has not been attempted before: comparison of Byzantine and Islamic examples of such material. Great claims have by turns been made for the quasi-modernity of both Byzantine and medieval Islamic hospitals. There are various ways in which the accuracy of the Byzantine–Islamic comparison could be appraised. But some obvious methodological caveats must be heeded first. Some circumstantial evidence suggests that the hospital formulary under his name became, if not standard, then widespread in the major hospitals of Baghdad, perhaps of the caliphate. The Islamic corpus is probably larger in its page extent than the Byzantine one. In his work, David Bennett is discussing something of the order of 200-230 pages of manuscript material, including some overlaps in content and the whole of the Romanos/Theophilos text, but not counting wholesale duplication.
