Browne MS P.21 (c.1600)

The Tasrih-i Mansuri was written by Mansur ibn Ilyas in 1386, and dedicated to the ruler of his province of Fars in modern Iran.

The five books deal with bones, nerves, muscles, veins and arteries, and there is a concluding section on compound organs and the formation of the fetus. The treatise is remarkable for its illustrations, one for each of the body systems, and one showing a pregnant female. Mansur relied heavily on earlier Arabic sources, and they may have supplied the models for his illustrations. It is possible that behind the Arabic sources (so many of them translated from Greek) lies an origin in the teaching of anatomy in the schools of Alexandria, and Mansur’s anatomy follows the doctrines of Galen on the systems of the body. The five system figures are related to those that circulated in the Latin West in the thirteenth century, and may have shared a common ancestor.

The skeleton figure, however, differs from western examples in perspective. The figure is seen from the back with the palms turned towards us. The head is hyper-extended as if we were looking over the top of the skull at the face upside down.

Peter Murray Jones