A Census of Greek Medical Manuscripts

"Having followed for several decades - though episodically - Alain Touwaide’s painstaking and time-consuming investigation, I can witness to the perseverance with which he performed and completed his endeavor. Now having carefully and patiently read his impressive volume, I can attest to the extreme accuracy, as well as to the sheer magnitude, of his accomplishment. His work is the result of long and difficult research in the catalogues of manuscript collections and scholarly literature, completed by personal in-situ inspection of many codices. With the present volume, all the data resulting from this quest are made available to the scholarly community."

from the Foreword by Mgr Paul Canart, Biblioteca Vaticana

"The census is an inventory of all known surviving Byzantine medical manuscripts — it lists their titles and locations — and is primarily a tool for other researchers to spread knowledge of horticulture, botany, medicine and literature in the Middle Ages. It took 30 years of concerted effort, Touwaide said, and increases the number of known manuscripts from approximately 1,500 to 2,300, tracked to some 150 locations. (...) This is more than just an exercise in logging historical documents. No two manuscripts of the same text turned out quite the same, and the fascination is in how they differ."

- Adrian Higgins, The Washington Post

"Touwaide and Appetiti visited collections as famous and varied as the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, the Vatican Library, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as well as small, privately owned collections scattered across the globe in order to catalogue and identify each manuscript. Additions to Diels’ catalogue list the title, the author if known, to which collection the manuscript belongs, and a brief overview of its contents. This information provides immense value to researchers, who can look up a manuscript and know beforehand if it contains subjects relevant to their study."

- Hannah Bauman, American Botanical Council

"The work of decades for Touwaide and Appetiti serves as an invaluable resource for classical scholars around the world, in the traditions of Diels and his original catalog. As medical science draws increasingly on natural products research for new sources of drugs, perhaps the knowledge recorded by ancient Greek physicians holds the key to the next big discovery."

- Hannah Bauman, Herbalgram, Number 113, Feb - April 2017

"... profound, very meticulously prepared, and convincing ... the book is the result of impressive studies conducted by its author over decades. It offers a considerable amount of important information ... a most useful publication indeed."

- Marie Cronier, Isis jounal, 2018