In the 11th century, the Persian physician Ibn S?n? wrote a five-volume medical encyclopedia called the Canon of Medicine, which, among other things, covered the basic principles of medicine as they stood at the time and listed around 800 drugs that could be used for treatment. The influence of this expansive work spread beyond the Middle East to Europe, connecting the Islamic world to such far-flung locations as Ireland, as a new discovery shows.
According to Atlas Obscura's Noor Al-Samarrai, two sheets of a 15th-century translation of the Canon of Medicine were recently found inside the binding of a 16th-century book. More specifically, reports the Guardian's Alison Flood, the manuscript had been trimmed and sewn into the spine of a Latin manual dealing with local administration, which has been owned by the same family in Cornwall, England, for the last 500 years until the modern-day owners noticed the strange text stitched into the binding.
