NLM Lends Rare Manuscript for Exhibit
Photo: NLM
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) shares its vast collection with the world in many ways, including through its institutional loan program, which enables qualifying institutions to borrow unique NLM collection items for public exhibitions.
Recently, the NLM loaned its unique early-15th-century Islamic manuscript, “The Key to the Mujiz of Ibn al-Nafis” to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for its international exhibition, Lumen: The Art and Science of Light. The exhibit explores the intersecting worlds of science and spirituality during the so-called “long Middle Ages” (800–1600 CE), a time of cohesive approach to scientific knowledge. The NLM’s loan to the Getty joins others from the National Gallery of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art and High Museum of Atlanta.
Authored by the Persian scholar Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Muhammed Aqsara’I and written in Arabic, “The Key to the Mujiz of Ibn al-Nafis” exemplifies the continuity of scientific developments that took place in the medieval world, as well as the contemporary quest to understand vision through physical study of the eye and the use of geometry to model light’s passage in and out of the eye.
The book also contains a schematic eye diagram which shows the visual system, representing the connection from the eyes, shown with black pupils, via the optic nerves drawn with red, to the chambers of the brain, depicted as concentric circles. This diagram illustrates textual commentary that was a hallmark of science and knowledge transmission during the long Middle Ages, when scholars debated, clarified and improved earlier optical theories on the physiology of the eye and the mechanics of vision.
Learn more about the NLM’s loan of this manuscript to The J. Paul Getty Museum through this NLM Circulating Now blog post, co-authored by the curators of Lumen: go.nih.gov/jkDW2T3.