Avicenna On the Four Elements from the Canon of Medicine Volume 1

I ordered this book thinking it was going to be an academic translation of one of Avicenna's works on the four elements -- with a scholarly discussion of the text, some notes on the work that went into translating the book, the translation itself (with copious footnotes or endnotes), and a bibliography and index. It has some of these to varying degrees, but the book itself is eclectic and not academic in the traditional sense.Avicenna's text is said to have been translated by O. Cameron Gruner and Mazar Shaw. It's not a recent translation since Gruner (b. 1877) was an MD and Professor of Pathology who died in 1972, and the text is just a snippet (about 10 pages) of Gruner's 1930 translation of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine. About 40 pages of Gruner's commentary on the Canon is included in the book I'm reviewing, but it's not written to explain Avicenna's theory of the four elements as much as it's trying to situate Avicenna's conception of medicine within the context of modern medicine (as it was practiced around 1930) and within other more traditional medical systems. Mr. Gruner also proclaims himself a Thomist, saying that "...readers accustomed to various modes of thought are invited across a bridge leading from their various starting points, across the chasm of modernism, until they reach the concise teaching of Thomistic philosophy, wherein all other aspects of the one truth receive their proportionate places." I have a deep respect for St. Thomas, but the above comment makes you wonder how objective Gruner's interpretation of Avicenna is going to be.Laleh Bakhtiar's Introduction starts off the book. It gives a comprehensive account of Avicenna's four elements, but it's grammar and spelling mistakes make it hard to understand -- it doesn't often define terms, it switches between terms interchangeably, and active and passive voice can sometimes be found in the same sentence.Here's an example where the senses of the word 'quality' are not defined:"Quality results from the opposing qualities of the elements; a mixture of hot, cold, wet, and dry. Balance comes when the strength of primary qualities are equal to these qualities -- an average of these qualities."Here's a paragraph with grammatical issues that tries to distinguish elemental properties from elemental qualities:"As phenomena of the external world and, in traditional medicine, the inner world, consist of the elements and their qualities, as well. Different elemental qualities are always based on the different properties of the elements (higher, lower, lighter, heavier, colder, hotter, etc.) The distinguishing characteristic of the elements is that they differ like two colors, red and green, and like two shades of a single color, light and dark blue or like shapes rough and square. The property is a characteristic of such a nature that it both distinguishes different elements from one another and at the same time orders them in definite ways."If the Introduction would have been vetted by a professional proofreader, and if time would have been taken to define terms, it would have been a much better Introduction. Still, the Introduction is illuminating and I did learn some things from it.The book has three sets of end-notes -- one for Bakhtair's Introduction, another for Gruner's remarks, and a third for the actual ten page translation. There is no Index or Bibliography, but a number of works are cited in the end-notes.