The animation Maimonides the Healer shows Maimonides receiving a letter with a medical query. He draws on all his knowledge to think up an answer and write a letter of advice, then sends out a boy to pick up medical ingredients to take with his letter to the person who is ill. There is a woman looking after the patient. She receives the letter and the ingredients and will use them to make the patient better. The animation also shows that Maimonides wrote medical books, such as Medical Aphorisms, which was hugely influential over the centuries. We also see that there are modern hospitals named after Maimonides because of his impact on the history of medicine. In the hospital in the animation, Maimonides sees a modern medical doctor reading some of Maimonides’ famous words and it makes him smile to know that he still has a positive influence in the world of medicine.
In making Maimonides the Healer, it was necessary to create a world in which the letter would appear. The illustrations were drawn by Panoply’s animator Steve K Simons, who then animated the illustrations to bring them to life. The street scenes, inside scenes, and the clothing of the people are based on medieval illustrations of Fustat, pharmacies, and medical doctors, and on early photographs of Cairo. Melonie Schmierer-Lee of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge advised us on some neat details. For example, it would be normal for Maimonides and his contemporaries to work at a writing board, sitting on the floor with cushions and rugs, rather than working at a table. You may also notice that the boy puts Maimonides’ letter in his sleeve. This was the usual way for messengers to carry letters in medieval Egypt.
Maimonides the Healer was made as part of a wider project called Maimonides From Scratch. The storyboard – the planning – of the animation was done as a collaboration between the Manchester Jewish Museum, school children, museum volunteers, and the academics working on the project, inspired by fragments of Maimonides’ work from the University of Cambridge Solomon-Schechter Cairo Genizah. The project is supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Accelerator funds, University of Southampton pump-priming and Marie Skłodowska-Curie awards. We hope to bring you more animations about different aspects of Maimonides’ fascinating life.