[The aphorisms of Yuhanna ibn Masawaih, physician of the Calif Haroun al-Rashid, and their diffusion to the West].

Jean Mésué, a Nestorian scholar, who practised and taught medicine in Bagdad in the tenth century, composed, besides numerous other works, an anthology of aphorisms, the dissemination of which was really extraordinary. There were 132 aphorisms concerning diseases and their treatment according to the doctor and the patients; some of them expressing home truths still valid today. From the East, Jean Mésué's aphorisms passed to the West where they met with amazing good luck, since the two Latin translations and the French translation were copied, then printed many times from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. It is the history of the handing down of this Arabian medical work that the author proposes to retrace in his communication.