Using Scopus and Web of Science databases we identified the Polish scientists with the highest number of publications, citations, and h-index in the field of pharmacy, pharmacology, and physiology. 148 such researchers were identified and then assigned to the research units in which they are employed. 31 such units were identified and analyzed.

Professor Jerzy Vetulani passed away on the 6th of April 2017. He was born on 21st January 1936 in Kraków. In 1957 he earned his B.A. in Biology and in 1963 in Chemistry from Jagiellonian University. He began to work in 1957 at the Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków and got a PhD in 1966. Prof. Vetulani did Habiltation in Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy in Wrocław in 1976. His scientific career throughout all extremely active scientific life was connected with the Institute of Pharmacology. He became Head of the Department of Biochemistry in 1976 and from 1994 until 2002 he was the Deputy Director for Science Affairs and from 2002 Vice Chairman of the Scientific Council. He was elected Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received a Doctor honoris causa degrees from the Medical University of Silesia and the Medical University of Łódź. He published about 240 original scientific papers in the areas of neuropharmacology and neurobiology. He was exceptional neuropharmacologist. His research, conducted together with Fridolin Sulser and his group allowed to obtain interesting data that repeatedly administered antidepressants induce adaptive changes in the noradrenergic system and to formulate a hypothesis on the mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs suggesting “downregulation” of β-adrenergic receptors. His research interests included neuropharmacology of addiction, neurodegeneration and mechanisms of memory. He was an excellent academic, admired and followed by many pharmacologists and neuroscientists. Professor Vetulani was also very active in the area of popularization of neuroscience. He was, a superb, provocative and witty speaker, someone who everybody wanted to hear. Professor Vetulani had the soul of the artist. In the late sixties, he was an announcer and one of the creators of famous Polish Kraków cabaret “Piwnica pod Baranami” (1954–1961) and more recently a regular participant in other cabaret “Gadający Pies”. Professor Jerzy Vetulani had many different talents and accompanying him always intellectual perversity and above all sense of freedom and independence.

The objective of this paper is the Arabic edition and the English translation of the Dissertation on thirst (الكلام في العطش), an anonymous text included in the miscellaneous manuscript nº 888 of the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Madrid (Spain). This small treatise describes what thirst is, the types of thirst that exist, the causes why hydroponics are averse to water, the reason why diabetic people are continuously thirsty, the causes why people with fever are thirsty, the reason why some foods produce thirst and others do not, and so on. The whole manuscript is composed of fourteen works, written by the same copyist along 170 folios under the general title The book of medical and philosophical curiosities and utilities (كتاب النكت والثمار الطبية والفلسفية) and their subject are curious matters that are generally out of the span of most works on these two branches of knowledge.

Manuscript number 888 of the Collection of Arabic manuscripts of the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial (Spain) contains a small treatise composed by physician and pharmacologist ʿĪsā b. Māssah al-Baṣrī (9th century). This work offers a detailed description of different causal agents that originate the sexual impulse and its culmination, the coitus. The treatise enumerates and interprets the physical factors that conform man’s sexual response, which is viewed as a purely physiological process, as well as the cultural and psychological factors that shape and modulate the sexual preferences of each individual.