ISLAMIC  MEDICINE  IN  MEDIEVAL

 

Between the fall of Rome in the 5^th century AD and the Renaissance in the 15^th century, knowledge of medicine flourished in the Islamic empire. Islamic medicine was highly eclectic. That is, it combined elements of a number of other systems. It was strongly influenced by Greek medicine, knowledge of which came by means of Nestorian monks; by the medical writings of the Talmud; and by astrologic teachings from Egypt and the Orient to which addenda and commentaries were attached, especially concerning the use of drugs. The whole was codified in writing so that clinical trials could be evaluated to a limited extent. Basic chemical processes, including distillation, crystallization, and sublimation, were discovered. Such Arabic words as alkali, alcohol, syrup, and drug are now widely used.

 

The great physicians of the Islamic world included, in the eastern caliphate, Rhazes, a Turk who distinguished smallpox from measles, and Avicenna, the "Prince of Physicians," who was the chief physician of the celebrated hospital in Baghdad. Avicenna's medical texts attempted the impossible; that is, he tried to codify all of medicine while squaring its facts with the systems of Galen and Aristotle. This mélange nevertheless influenced European thought for centuries. In the western caliphate, under the Umayyad dynasty, the greatest clinicians were Avenzoar of Cordoba and Maimonides. Avenzoar was one of the few physicians in the centuries prior to the Renaissance with the courage to challenge the writings of Galen. Maimonides, a Jewish physician also of Cordoba, reacted to the increasing problems of being Jewish there and left for the greater freedom of the eastern caliphate, where he became Saladin's personal physician. Among his medical treatises is a text on hygiene that was highly influential.

 

The Islamic civilization also established several hospitals. The greatest were the ones at Damascus (1160), which remained active for three centuries, and the Al-Mansur Hospital in Cairo (1276). The latter was the first hospital to emphasize science, teaching, and social service. It had separate wards for women, children, and convalescents, wards dedicated to specific diseases, an extensive library, and out-patient clinics.

 

Islamic cultures are among the most interesting, complex, and dynamic in the world. At the same time, they are among the least known in the West. From its dramatic rise in the seventh century A. D. to the present, Islamic civilization has covered a large part of the globe, incorporating many subcultures and languages into its orbit, and vigorously engaging the peoples around it.

 

Medicine was a central part of medieval Islamic culture. Disease and health were of importance to rich and poor alike, as indeed they are in every civilization. Responding to circumstances of time and place, Islamic physicians and scholars developed a large and complex medical literature exploring and synthesizing the theory and practice of medicine. This extensive literature was not specialized in the sense that modern medical literature is. Rather, it was integrated with learned traditions in philosophy, natural science, mathematics, astrology, alchemy, and religion.

 

Islamic medicine was built on tradition, chiefly the theoretical and practical knowledge developed in Greece and Rome. For Islamic scholars, Galen and Hippocrates were pre-eminent authorities, followed by Hellenic scholars in Alexandria. Islamic scholars translated their voluminous writings from Greek into Arabic and then produced new medical knowledge based on those texts. In order to make the Greek tradition more accessible, understandable, and teachable, Islamic scholars ordered and made more systematic the vast and sometime inconsistent Greco-Roman medical knowledge by writing encyclopedias and summaries.

 

Islamic medicine drew upon Hellenic medical tradition to form its own. Likewise, medieval and early modern scholars in Europe drew upon Islamic traditions and translations as the foundation for their medical enterprise. It was through Arabic translations that the West learned of Hellenic medicine, including the works of Galen and Hippocrates. Of equal if not of greater influence in Western Europe were systematic and comprehensive works such as Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, which were translated into Latin and then disseminated in manuscript and printed form throughout Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alone, the Canon of Medicine was published more than thirty-five times.

 

As noted earlier, medieval Islamic medicine was not an appendage of Islamic culture but rather immersed in it. This means, among other things, that Islamic medicine participated fully in the Islamic traditions of book-making, including calligraphy, illustration, paper making, and binding.

 

Because copying the Qur'an was an act of piety, calligraphy for even non-religious subjects came to be more than the mere reproduction of texts--it was and is a form of applied and even fine art, engrossing readers and writers alike.

 

Islamic illustration practices tended to be adopted from the Byzantine and Persian cultures and to have an ambivalent and particularly complex history within Islamic culture.

 

Islam learned paper making from China but made the fateful decision to use linen as the raw material for paper, rather than mulberry bark, or other organic matter. The transfer of Chinese technology and the innovation in the use of linen provided a writing material more economical than parchment and more durable than papyrus. It was from Islam that the rest of the world learned to make paper from linen.

Except for the paper manufacturing, binding is the Islamic book craft least studied historically. Until more research on it is done, we can say that Islamic craftsmen and artists developed characteristic book-binding forms, most of which were functional--providing protection to paper and ink--with some being decorative, at times of a very high order.

 

 

 

    AVICENNA  IBN-I SINA 980 – 1037

   

known to the Muslim world as Ibn-i Sina, Turkish philosopher and physician, born near Buhara (now in Uzbekistan). The son of a government official, Avicenna studied medicine and philosophy in Buhara. At the age of 18 he was rewarded for his medical abilities with the post of court physician to the Samanid ruler of Buhara. He remained in this position until the fall of the Samanid Empire in 999, and spent the last 14 years of his life as scientific adviser and physician to the ruler of Isfahan.

Regarded by Muslims as one of the greatest Islamic philosophers, Avicenna is an important figure in the fields of medicine and philosophy. His work The Canon of Medicine was long preeminent in the Middle East and in Europe as a textbook. It is significant as a systematic classification and summary of medical and pharmaceutical knowledge up to and including Avicenna's time. The first Latin translation of the work was made in the 12th century, the Hebrew version appeared in 1491, and the Arabic text in 1593, only the second text ever printed in Arabic.

Avicenna's best-known philosophical work is Kitab ash-Shifa (Turk., “Book of Healing”), a collection of treatises on Aristotelian logic, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences, and other subjects. Avicenna's own philosophy was based on a combination of the philosophy of Aristotle and Neo-Platonism. Like most medieval philosophers, Avicenna denied the immortality of the individual soul, God's interest in particulars, and the creation of the world in time—all of which were central to mainstream Islamic doctrine. Because of his views, Avicenna became the main target of an attack on such philosophy by mainstream Sunni theologians such as al-Gazali. Nevertheless, Avicenna's philosophy remained influential throughout the middle Ages.

          

    

 

Al Farabi 873 – 950

also known as Alfarabius, the first-known philosopher in the Islamic world to uphold the primacy of philosophical truth over revelation, claiming that, contrary to the beliefs of various other religions, philosophical truths are the same throughout the world. He was born in Farab, Transoxiana (now Uzbekistan), of Turkish parentage. He studied first in Khorasan (in Iran) and then in Baghdad, where his teachers were Syriac Christians well acquainted with Greek philosophy. He eventually came to the court of Sayf al-Dawla, the ruler of Aleppo in Syria. Al-Farabi was one of the earliest Islamic thinkers to transmit to the Arab world the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle (which he considered essentially identical), thereby greatly influencing such later Islamic philosophers as Avicenna and Averroës.

 

Influenced in his metaphysical views by the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Al-Farabi posited a Supreme Being who had created the world through the exercise of rational intelligence. He believed this same rational faculty to be the sole part of the human being that is immortal, and thus he set as the paramount human goal the development of that rational faculty. Al-Farabi gave considerably more attention to political theory than did any other Islamic philosopher, adapting the Platonic system to the contemporary Muslim political situation in The Perfect City.

 

Alfarabius formulated as an ideal a universal religion of which all other existing religions are considered symbolic expressions. Of his 100 or so works, many have been lost, including his commentaries on Aristotle. Many others have been preserved only in medieval Latin translation. In addition to his philosophical writings, he compiled a catalogue of the sciences, the first Muslim work to attempt a systematization of human knowledge. He also made a contribution to musical theory in his “great book of music”.

 

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al Razi   865 – 925

known to Europeans as Rhazes, was one of the most important and influential of all medieval Islamic physicians. He was born in the Persian city of Rayy, near present-day Tehran, and died in the same town. Before learning medicine, he studied philosophy, alchemy, and music. He served as physician at the Samanid court in Central Asia and headed hospitals in Rayy and Baghdad. Razi wrote on many different subjects. His general medical textbook, Kitab al-Mansuri fi al-tibb ("The Book of Medicine for Mansur") was written for the Samanid ruler of Rayy, Abu Salih al-Mansur. His voluminous working files of readings and personal observations were assembled posthumously by his students and circulated under the name Kitab al-Hawi fi al-tibb ("The Comprehensive Book on Medicine"). Over 1000 of his case histories are also preserved today, and they provide an important insight into the working life of the greatest medieval clinician.

 

Maimonides 1135 – 1204

Jewish philosopher and physician, born in Córdoba, Spain. He was also known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, or, from the initials of his name, Rambam. Following the capture of Córdoba in 1148 by the Almohads, who imposed the ways of Islam on Christians and Jews alike, Maimonides's family decided to emigrate. After years of wandering they finally settled in Cairo. There Maimonides eventually became the chief rabbi of Cairo and physician to Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria.

Maimonides' contributions to the development of Judaism earned him the title “second Moses”. His greatest work in the field of Jewish law is the Mishneh Torah, arranged in 14 books and written in Hebrew (1170-1180), which he continued to revise until his death. In addition, he formulated the Thirteen Articles of Faith, one of several creeds to which many Orthodox Jews still adhere. He is also regarded as the outstanding Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages. In the Guide for the Perplexed, written in Arabic (c. 1190), Maimonides sought to harmonize faith and reason by reconciling the tenets of rabbinic Judaism with the rationalism of Aristotelian philosophy in its modified Arabic form, which includes elements of Neoplatonism. This work, in which he considers the nature of God and creation, free will, and the problem of good and evil, profoundly influenced such Christian philosophers as St Thomas Aquinas and St Albertus Magnus. His use of an allegorical method of biblical interpretation, which minimized anthropomorphism, was opposed for several centuries by many Orthodox rabbis; but the issues involved have lost their relevancy in modern times. Maimonides' fame as a physician equaled his fame as a philosopher and authority on Judaic law. He also produced writings on astronomy, logic, and mathematics.