arabian medicine

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ARABIAN MEDICINE


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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSC. F. CLAY, MANAGER

LONDON : FETTER LANE, E.C. 4

LONDON : H. K. LEWIS AND CO., LTD.136, Gower Street, W.C. iNEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO.BOMBAY )CALCUTTA L MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.MADRAS JTORONTO : THE MACMILLAN CO. OFCANADA, LTD.TOKYO : MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHAALL RIGHTS RESERVED


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The Rival Physicians(See pp. 89-90 of the text}


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ARABIAN MEDICINEBEING THE F1TZPATRICK LECTURESDELIVERED AT THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS

IN NOVEMBER 1919 AND NOVEMBER 1920BY

EDWARD G. BROWNE, M.B., F.R.C.P.,SIR THOMAS ADAMS'S PROFESSOR OF ARABIC IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE


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R

TOSIR NORMAN MOORE, BART., M.D.,PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS,

IN ADMIRATION OF HIS CATHOLIC SCHOLARSHIP, INGRATITUDE FOR HIS INSPIRING TEACHING, AND INMEMORY OF THREE FRUITFUL YEARS PASSED UNDERHIS GUIDANCE AT ST BARTHOLOMEW'S HOSPITAL,

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK


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vi Prefacepages 1 , that great Persian poem the Mathnawi ofJalalu'd-Din Riimf will be better appreciated by onewho is conversant with the medical literature of theperiod.

Before I began to prepare the FitzPatrick lecturesnow offered to the public I consulted Sir Clifford Allbutt,the Regius Professor of Medicine in the University ofCambridge, as to the best books on the history of thatscience which the Prophet Muhammad, in a traditionfamiliar to all Muslims, is said to have linked in import-ance with Theology 2. Of the numerous works whichSir Clifford Allbutt indicated, and, in many cases, lentto me for preliminary study, I have derived more profitfrom none than from Professor Max Neuburger's excel-lent Geschichte der Medizin (Stuttgart, 1 908). Althoughthe section of this work dealing with Arabian Medicinecomprises only 86 pages 3, it is extraordinarily rich infacts and accurate in details, and supplies an outline ofthe subject which is susceptible of amplification but notof correction.

I have thought it better to publish these four lecturesin the form in which they were originally delivered thanto recast them in a fresh mould, but the proofs have beenread by several of my friends and colleagues, namelyDr F. H. H. Guillemard, M.D., Dr E. H. Minns, Litt.D.,

1 See pp. 87-88 infra. Science is twofold : Theology and Medicine.

8 Vol. i, part ii, pp. 142-228 = pp. 346-394 of vol. i of ErnestPlayfair's English translation (London, 1910).


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Preface viiMirza Muhammad Khan of Qazwin, and MuhammadIqbal,

to all of whom I am indebted for many valuablecorrections and suggestions. I am also deeply indebtedto Professor A. A. Bevan and the Rev. Professor D. S.Margoliouth for their help in establishing the text andemending the translation of the clinical case recordedby ar-Razi which will be found on pp. 51-3 infra.

It has afforded me particular pleasure to be allowedto dedicate this little volume explicitly to Sir NormanMoore, as representing that fine tradition of learning,acumen and humanity proper in all countries and agesto the great and noble profession of Medicine, withwhich living tradition, to my infinite advantage, I wasbrought in contact in my student days both here atCambridge and in St Bartholomew's Hospital; and im-plicitly to those other great teachers in these two famousschools of medical learning whose methods of investi-gation and exposition I have endeavoured to apply inother fields of knowledge.

EDWARD G. BROWNE.April 1 6, 1921.


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CONTENTSTHE RIVAL PHYSICIANS Frontispiece(Photo, by Mr R. B. Fleming from the British Museum MS. Or. 2265, f. 26 b.)

PAGELECTURE I iMeaning of the term Arabian Medicine Periods ofArabian and Islamic history The transmission of Greeklearning Syrian and Persian contributions The Latino-Barbari Aptitude of Arabic for scientific purposes.

LECTURE II 33Evolution of scientific terminology in Arabic Was dissec-tion

practised by the Muslims? Four early Persian medicalwriters: (i) 'AH ibn Rabban; (2) Abti Bakr Muhammad ibnZakariyyaar-Razf; (3) 'All ibnu'l-'Abbas al-Majiisi; (4) Abu'Ali IJusayn ibn Sfna (Avicenna).

LECTURE III 65Recapitulation Arabianpopular Medicine The translatorsfrom Arabic into Latin Practice of Medicine in the time ofthe Crusades Anecdotes of notable cures in Arabic andPersian literature Psychotherapeusis Love and Melan-cholia Persian medical works Introduction of EuropeanMedicine into Muslim lands.

LECTURE IV 97Contributions of the Moors of Spain The School of Toledo

Persian medical literature from the twelfth to the four-teenth centuries Biographical works of the thirteenth cen-tury Muslim hospitals Letters of Rashid the Physician

Outlines of Muslim cosmogony, physical science and phy-siology Conclusion.

INDEX 127


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LECTURE IIHE extent of my subject and the limitations of thetime at my disposal forbid me, even were it otherwisedesirable, to introduce into these lectures any unessentialor irrelevant matter. Yet I cannot lose this, the firstopportunity accorded to me since my election as a Fellowof this College, of expressing publicly my deep sense ofgratitude for an honour as highly appreciated as un-expected. I am well aware that this honour was con-ferred on me on the ground (the only ground on whichit could have been conferred in my case) that, havingregard to the position occupied by Arabian Medicinein the historyofour profession, it was desirable that thereshould be amongst the Fellows of the College one whocould study that system at first hand. There is a pro-verbial saying amongst the Arabs when the time comeswhen the services of a person or thing provided fora particular contingency are at last actually required^yjLl) Sjl ^5^0 tj i4h*o' U I have not stored thee up,my tear, save for my time of distress ', and when I .was invited to deliver the FitzPatrick lectures this year,

1 felt that this proverb was applicable, and that, eventhough I felt myself unworthy of this fresh honour onthe part of the College, it was impossible to decline,especially in view of the expressed wish of the Presidentof the College, Sir Norman Moore, to whose inspiringteaching in my far-off student days I owe a greater debtof gratitude than I can adequately express. I can onlyhope that at the conclusion of my lectures you may notapply to me another proverbial saying of the Arabs :B. A. M. I


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Arabian Medicine. Iy ^> At the first bout his

quarter-staff was broken.When we speak of Arabian Science or ArabianMedicine we mean that body of scientific or medical

doctrine which is enshrined in books written in theArabic language, but which is for the most part Greekin its origin, though with Indian, Persian and Syrianaccretions, and only in a very small degree the productof the Arabian mind. Its importance, as has long beenrecognized, lies not in its originality, but in the fact thatin the long interval which separated the decay of Greeklearning from the Renascence it represented the mostfaithful tradition ofancient Wisdom, and was during theDark Ages the principal source from which Europederived such philosophical and scientific ideas as shepossessed. The translation of the Greek books intoArabic, either directly or through intermediate Syriacversions, was effected for the most part under the en-lightened patronage of the early 'Abbasid Caliphs atBaghdad between the middle of the eighth and ninthcenturies of our era by skilful and painstaking scholarswho were for the most part neither Arabs nor evenMuhammadanSjbut Syrians, Hebrews or Persians of theChristian, Jewish or Magian faith. Some four or fivecenturies later European seekers after knowledge, cut offfrom the original Greek sources, betook themselves withever increasing enthusiasm to this Arabian presentationof the ancient learning, and rehabilitated it in a Latindress; and for the first century after the discovery ofthe art of printing the Latin renderings of Arabicphilosophical, scientific and medical works constituteda considerable proportion of the output of the EuropeanPress; until the revival of a direct knowledge of the


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Recent Revival of Interest 3Greek originals in the first place, and the inaugurationof a fresh, fruitful and first-hand investigation of naturalphenomena in the second, robbed them to a great ex-tent of their prestige and their utility, and changed theexcessive veneration in which they had hitherto beenheld into an equally exaggerated contempt.

In recent years, however, when the interest andimportance of what may be called the Embryology ofScience has obtained recognition, the Arabian, togetherwith other ancient and obsolete systems of Medicine,has attracted increasing attention, has formed the sub-ject of much admirable and ingenious research, and hasalready produced a fairly copious literature. The chiefArabic biographical and bibliographical sources, such as\hzFihrist or Index (377/987), al-Qifti's History ofthePhilosophers (c. 624/1227), Ibn Abi Usaybi'a's ClassesofPhysicians (640/1 242), the great bibliography of HajjiKhalifa (+1068/1658) and the like, have been madeavailable in excellent editions, while their most essentialcontents have been summarized by Wenrich, Wiisten-feld, Leclerc, Brockelmann and others ; the generalcharacter and relations of Arabian Medicine have beenconcisely yet adequatelydescribed by Neuburger, Pagel,Withington and Garrison, to name only a few of themore recent writers on the history of Medicine; whileamongst more specialized investigations, to mention onebranch only of the subject, the admirable works of DrP. de Koning and Dr Max Simon have accurately de-termined the anatomical terminology of the Arabs andits equivalence with that of the Greek anatomists. Forthe pathological terminology much more remains to bedone, and I have been greatly hampered in my readingof Arabic medical books by the difficulty of determiningthe exact scientific signification of many words used inI 2


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4 Arabian Medicine. Ithe ordinary literary language in a looser and less pre-cise sense than that which they evidently bear in thetechnical works in question. Nor is much help to bederived from the medieval translations of the Latino-Barbari, who too often simply preserve in a distortedform the Arabic term which they pretend to translate.Thus the first section of the first discourse of the firstpart of the third book of Avicenna's great Qdntin isentitled in the Latin Version Sermo universalis de Soda,but who, not having the original before him, coulddivine that soda stands for the Arabic etj^, the ordinaryArabic word for a headache, being the regularly formednoun of pain from the verb *J~o to split ?

Now the history of Arabian Medicine can only bestudied in connection with the general history of Islam,which, as you all know, first began to assume politicalsignificance in A.D. 622. In that year Muhammad,whose real miracle was that he inspired the warringtribes of Arabia with a common religious and socialideal, welded them into one people, sent them forthto conquer half the then known world, and founded anEmpire destined to rival and replace those of Caesarand Chosroes, transferred the sceae of his activitiesfrom Mecca to al-Madina. This event marks thebeginning of the Muhammadan era known as the hijraor Flight, from which 1338 lunar years have nowelapsed. About the middle of this period, viz. in theseventh century of the Flight and the thirteenth of ourera, Arabian or, more correctly speaking, Muham-madan Civilization suffered through the Mongol orTartar invasion an injury from which it never recovered,and which destroyed for ever the Caliphate, the nominalunity of the Arabian Empire, and the pre-eminence of


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The Golden Age (A.D. 750-850) 5Baghdad as a centre of learning. Even before this,however, partly in consequence of the triumph of thenarrower and more orthodox doctrines of the Ash'ariover the more liberal Mu'tazila school of theology,partly in consequence of the gradual displacement ofArabian and Persian by Turkish influences in thepolitical world, science, and particularly philosophy(which was so closely connected with medicine thatthe title ffakim was, and still is, indifferently appliedalike to the metaphysician and the physician), had ceasedto be cultivated with the same enthusiasm and assiduitywhich had prevailed in the Golden Prime of goodHarunu'r-Rashid and his immediate predecessors andsuccessors. This Golden Age of Arabian learning cul-minated in the century between A.D. 750 and 850, thecentury succeeding the establishment of the 'AbbdsidCaliphate with its metropolis at Baghdad. Of the tenCaliphs who reigned during this period the second,al-Mansiir, and the seventh, al-Ma'mun (whose motherand wife were both Persians, and in whose reign Persianinfluences, already powerful, reached their culminatingpoint), were conspicuous for their intellectual curiosityand for their love and generous patronage of learning,and for a broad tolerancewhich scandalized the orthodoxand led one of them to change the Caliph's title ofCommander of the Faithful (Amirul-Muminin} intothat of Commander of the Unbelievers (Amtrul-Kdfirinf. To the ancient learning, especially that ofthe ancient Greeks, they were enthusiastically attached ;by purchase, conquest or exchange they possessed them-selves of countless precious manuscripts, Greek andother, which they stored in the Royal Library orBaytul-Hikmat{ House ofWisdom ) and caused to be

1 Al-Ya'qtibi, ed. Houtsma, p. 546.


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6 Arabian Medicine. Itranslated, by the most competent scholars they couldattract to their court, into Arabic, either directly fromthe Greek, or through the intermediary of the Syriaclanguage. In the Fihrist or Index (i.e. of Sciences), anArabic work composed in A.D. 987, more than a centuryafter what I have spoken of as the Golden Age, wehave at once a mirror of the learning of that time, andan indicator of the appalling losses which it afterwardssustained, for of the books there enumerated it wouldhardly be an exaggeration to say that not one in athousand now exists even in the most fragmentary form.The hateful Mongols ' ' that detestable nation of Satan, ' 'as old Matthew Paris (writing in A.D. 1240) calls them,who poured forth like devils from Tartarus so that theyare rightly called 'Tartars' did their work of de-vastation only too thoroughly, and the Muhammadanculture which survived the sack of Baghdad and the ex-tinction of the Caliphate in A.D. 1258 was but a shadowof that which preceded it.

I have used the term Muhammadan Civilization,which, for reasons to be given shortly, I prefer toArabian. As Latin was the learned language of me-dieval Europe, so was (and to some extent is) Arabicthe learned language of the whole Muhammadan world.There is no objection to our talking of Arabian Science or Arabian Medicine so long as we never lose sightof the fact that this simply means the body of scientificor medical doctrine set forth in the Arabic language, forit is not until the eleventh century of our era that webegin to meet with what may be called a vernacularscientific literature in Muhammadan lands, a litera-ture typified by such works as al-Binini's Tafhim onastronomy (eleventh century) and the Dhakhira or


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Arabs not aptfor Research 7Thesaurus of Medicine composed for the King ofKhwarazm or Khiva in the twelfth century.Now this scientific literature in the Arabic languagewas for the most part produced by Persians, Syrians,Jews, and in a lesser degree by Greeks, but only to avery small extent by genuine Arabs. Ibn Khaldiin,who composed his celebrated Prolegomena to the Studyof History one of the most remarkable books inArabic about A.D. 1400, judges his countrymen veryharshly. He declares that every country conquered bythem is soon ruined 1, that they are incapable of evolvinga stable and orderly system of government 2, that ofall people in the world they are the least capable ofruling a kingdom 3 , and that of all people in the worldthey have the least aptitude for the arts 4 . Goldziher,one of the profoundest Arabic scholars of our time andhimself a Jew, rightly says that Lagarde goes too farwhen he asserts that of the Muhammadans who have,achieved anything in science not one was a Semite ;yet he himself is constrained to admit that even in thereligious sciences (exegesis of the Quran, tradition,jurisprudence, and the like) the Arabian elementlagged far behind the non-Arabian 5. Much more evi-dence of this might be adduced, but I will content my-self with one instance (hitherto, I believe, unnoticed inEurope) of the mistrust with which Arab practitionersof medicine were regarded even by their own people.The anecdote in question is related by that most learnedbut discursive writer al-Jahiz (so called on account ofhis prominent eyes) in his Book of Misers (Kitdbul-Bukhald*} and concerns an Arabian physician named

1 De Slane's transl., i, p. 310. 2 Ibid., i, p. 311.3 Ibid., ii, p. 314. 4 Ibid., ii, p. 365.5 See my Lit. Hist, of Persia, i, p. 260.8 Ed. Van Vloten, pp. 109-110.


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8 Arabian Medicine. IAsad ibn Janf, who, even in a year of pestilence, andin spite of his recognized learning, skill and diligence,had but few patients. Being asked the reason of thisby one of his acquaintances he replied: In the firstplace I am a Muslim, and before I studied medicine,nay, before ever I was created, the people held the viewthat Muslims are not successful physicians. Furthermy name is Asad, and it should have been Salfba,Mara'il, Yuhanna or Bira [i.e. a Syriac or Aramaicname] ; and my kunya is Abu'l-Harith, and it shouldhave been Abu 'Isa, Abu Zakariyya or Abu Ibrahim[i.e. Christian or Jewish instead of Muhammadan]; andI wear a cloak of white cotton, and it should have beenof black silk ; and my speech is Arabic, and it shouldhave been the speech of the people of Jundi-Shapiir[in S.W. Persia].The Arabs, whose scepticism was not confined tomatters of religion, avenged themselves to some extentby disparaging verses about doctors, such as thefollowing on the death of Yuhanna ibn Masawayhi(the Mesues of the medieval writers) in A.D. 857 :

i a-,. k:..,,j *9 '.iv .'J t> 1 rt _.o^o {Sr* O 9 *5 ' L^-^ 1 *J*W ^5*r wj>J>JU U

A,\J j fTjjJI s^J*. ' j^JJI J ^jlj^l ^ ^jljUJI OU Verily the physician, with his physic and his drugs,Cannot avert a summons that hath come.What ails the physician that he dies of the diseaseWhich he used to cure in time gone by ?There died alike he who administered the drug, andhewho took the drug,And he who imported and sold the drug, and he who bought it.

Similar in purport are the following verses from thepopular romance of 'Antara, the old Bedouin hero :


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Earlier Periods of Arabian Historyj i)jJj J^ U 131

1 Ujpt ^13 U 0^1 JJJ The physician says to thee, 'I can cure thee?When he feels thy wrist and thy arm;But did the physician know a curefor diseaseWhich would ward off death, he would not himself suffer the death

agony.

Now in considering the genesis and developmentof the so-called Arabian Medicine, of which, though themain outlines are clearly determined, many detailsremain to be filled in, we may most conveniently beginby enquiring what was the state of medical knowledge,or ignorance, amongst the ancient Arabs before thedriving force of Islam destroyed their secular isolation,sent them out to conquer half the then known world,and brought this primitive but quick-witted people intoclose contact with the ancient civilization of the Greeks,Persians, Egyptians, Indians and others. We have todistinguish three periods antecedent to what I have calledthe Golden Age, viz. :

(1) The Jdhiliyyat) or Pagan Period, preceding therise and speedy triumph of Islam, which was fullyaccomplished by the middle of the seventh century ofour era.

(2) The theocratic period of the Prophet and hisimmediate successors, the FourOrthodox Caliphs, whichendured in all, from the hijra or Flight to theassassination of 'Ali, less than forty years (A.D. 622-66 1 ) and which had its centre at al-Madina, the ancientYathrib (idepnnra).(3) The period of the Umayyad Caliphs, whoseimmense Empire stretched from Spain to Samarqand,and whose court at Damascus speedily began to show


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io Arabian Medicine. Ia luxury and wealth hitherto utterly undreamed of bythe Arabs.

For our present purpose it is hardly necessary toconsider separately the first and second of these threeperiods, those namely which preceded and immediatelyfollowed the rise of Islam, and which, however widelythey differed in their theological, ethical and politicalaspects, were, as regards scientific knowledge, almoston the same level. The life of the old pagan Arabs wasrough and primitive in the highest degree very muchwhat the life of the Bedouin of Inner Arabia remains tothis day ; the different tribes were constantly engagedin savage wars fomented by interminable vendettas;only the strong and resourceful could hold their own,and for the weak and sick there was little chance ofsurvival. On the other hand they were intelligent, re-sourceful, courageous, hardy, chivalrous in manyrespects,very observant of all natural phenomena which camewithin the range of their observation, and possessed ofa language of great wealth and virility of which theywere inordinately proud, so that to this day, when theystill praise God who created the Arabic language thebest of all languages, the poems of that far-off time,describing their raids, their battles, their venturousjourneys and their love affairs, remain the standard andmodel of the chastest and most classical Arabic. Mostof these warring tribes acknowledged no authority savethat of their own chiefs and princes; only on the bordersof the Persian and Roman Empires respectively, in thelittle kingdoms of Hira and Ghassan, did the elementsof civilization and science exist.

The first Arab doctor mentioned by those carefulbiographers of philosophers and physicians, al-Qifti andIbn Abi Usaybi'a, is al-Harith ibn Kalada, an elder


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Al-Hdrith ibn Kalada 1 1contemporary of the Prophet Muhammad, who hadcompleted his studies at the great Persian medical schoolof Jundi-Shapur, and who had the honour of being con-sulted on at least one occasion by the great PersianKing Khusraw Amisharwan (the Kisrd of the Arabs andChosroes of the Greeks) who harboured and protectedthe Neo-Platonist philosophers driven into exile by theintolerance of the Emperor Justinian. An account ofthis interview, authentic or otherwise, fills a couple ofclosely-printed pages of Arabic in Ibn Abi Usaybi'a'sClasses of Physicians, and the substance of it is givenby Dr Lucien Leclerc in his Histoire de la MddecineArabe. It consists almost entirely of general hygienicprinciples, sound enough as far as they go, but of littletechnical interest. A certain tragic interest attachesto Nadr, the son of this al-Harith 1, who like hisfather seems to have had some skill in medicine anda Persian education. This led him to mock at thebiblical anecdotes contained in the Qurdn, these being,he did not hesitate to say, much less entertaining andinstructive than the old Persian legends about Rustamand Isfandiyar, with which he would distract theattention and divert the interest of the Prophet'saudience. Muhammad never forgave him for this, andwhen he was taken prisoner at the Battle of Badr thefirst notable victory of the Muslims over the un-believers he caused him to be put to death.

Of the Prophet's own ideas about medicine and1 My learned friend Mirza Muhammad of Qazwin, after reading

these pages, has proved to me by many arguments and citations thatNadr was not, as Ibn Abi Usaybi'a asserts, a son of al-Harith ibnKalada, the physician, of the tribe of Thaqif, but of al-Harith ibn'Alqama ibn Kalada, a totally different person, though contem-porary.


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12 Arabian Medicine. Ihygiene (partly derived, very likely, from the above-mentioned al-Harith) we can form a fairly accurate ideafrom the very full and carefully authenticated body oftraditions of his sayings and doings which, after theQurdn, forms the most authoritative basis of Muham-madan doctrine. These traditions, finally collected andarranged during the ninth and tenth centuries of ourera, are grouped according to subjects, each subjectconstituting a book (kitdb) and each tradition achapter (bdb}. If we take the Sahth of al-Bukhari,the most celebrated of these collections, we find at thebeginning of the fourth volume two books dealing withmedicine and the sick, containing in all 80 chapters.This looks promising ; but when we come to examinethem more closely we find that only a small proportiondeal with medicine, surgery or therapeutics as weunderstand them, and that the majority are concernedwith such matters as the visitation, encouragement andspiritual consolation of the sick, the evil eye, magic,talismans, amulets and protective prayers and formulae.Although the Prophet declares that for every maladywherewith God afflicts mankind He has appointed asuitable remedy, he subsequently limits the principalmethods of treatment to three, the administration ofhoney, cupping, and the actual cautery, and he re-commends his followers to avoid or make sparing use ofthe latter. Camel's milk, fennel-flower (Nigella sativa),aloes, antimony (for ophthalmia), manna, and, as astyptic, the ashes of burnt matting, are amongst theother therapeutical agents mentioned. The diseasesreferred to include headache and migraine, ophthalmia,leprosy, pleurisy, pestilence and fever, which is charac-terized as an exhalation of Hell. The Prophet adviseshis followers not to visit a country where pestilence


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The ' 'Prophet 's Medicine 13is raging, but not to flee from it if they find themselvesthere. The scanty material furnished by these and othertraditions (for the Qurdn, apart from some mention ofwounds and a vague popular Embryology, containshardly any medical matter) has been more or lesssystematized by later writers as what is termed Tibbun-Nabi, or the Prophet's Medicine, and I am informedthat a manual so entitled is still one of the first booksread by the student of the Old Medicine in India, alongwith the abridgment of Avicenna's Qdnun known asthe Qdxtincka.The ingenious Ibn Khaldiin, whom we have alreadyhad occasion to mention, speaks slightingly 1 of thisProphetic Medicine and of the indigenous ArabMedicine which it summarized and of which it formedpart, but judiciously adds that we are not called uponto conform to its rules, since the Prophet's missionwas to make known to us the prescriptions of the DivineLaw, and not to instruct us in Medicine and the commonpractices of ordinary life. A propos of this he remindsus that on one occasion the Prophet endeavoured toforbid the artificial fecundation of the date-palm, withsuch disastrous results to the fruit-crop that he with-drew his prohibition with the remark, You knowbetter than I do what concerns your worldly interests.One is then under no obligation, continues our author,to believe that the medical prescriptions handed downeven in authentic traditions have been transmitted tous as rules which we are bound to observe; nothing inthese traditions indicates that this is the case. It ishowever true that if one likes to employ these remedieswith the object of earning the Divine Blessing, and ifone takes them with sincere faith, one may derive from

1 De Slane'stransl., iii, pp. 163-4.


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14 Arabian Medicine. /them great advantage, though they form no part ofMedicine properly so-called.

I hope I have now said enough to show how widewas the difference between what passed for medicalknowledge amongst the early Arabs of the pagan,prophetic and patriarchal periods, and the elaboratesystem built up on a Hippocratic and Galenic basis atBaghdad under the early 'Abbasid Caliphs. The factshere are certain and the data ample. More difficult isthe question how far this system of Medicine wasevolved under the Umayyad Caliphs in the intermediateperiod which lay between the middle of the seventh andthe middle of the eighth centuries of the Christian era.These Umayyads, though, indeed, purely Arab, were bythis time accustomed to the settled life and the amenitiesof civilization, and already far removed from theconquerors of Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, whomistook camphor for salt and found it insipid in theirfood; exchanged gold for an equal amount of silverthe yellow for the white, as they expressed it; andsold an incomparable royal jewel for a thousand piecesof money, because, as the vendor said when reproachedfor selling it so cheap, he knew no number beyonda thousand to ask for. Under these Umayyads theArabian or Islamic Empire attained its maximum ex-tent, for Spain, one of their chief glories, never acknow-ledged the 'Abbasid rule. In Egypt and Persia, as wellas in Syria and its capital Damascus, where they heldtheir court, they were in immediate contact with the chiefcentres of ancient learning. How far, we must enquire,did they profit by the opportunities thus afforded them ?

In the development of their theology, as von Kremerhas shown 1, they were almost certainly influenced by

1 Culturgeschichte d. Orients, vol. ii, pp. 401 et seqq.


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Early Study of Alchemy 15John of Damascus, entitled Chrysorrhoas, and namedin Arabic Mansiir, who enjoyed the favour of the firstUmayyad Caliph Mu'awiya. The first impulse given tothe desire of the Arabs for knowledge of the wisdom ofthe Greeks came from the Umayyad prince Khalid theson of Yazi'd the son of Mu'awiya, who had a passionfor Alchemy. According to the Fikrist 1, the oldest andbest existing source of our knowledge on these matters,he assembled the Greek philosophers in Egypt andcommanded them to translateGreek and Egyptian bookson this subject into Arabic ; and these, says the authorof the Fihrist, were the first translations made inIslam from one language to another. With this princeis associated the celebrated Arabian alchemist Jabir ibnHayydn, famous in medieval Europe under the nameof Geber. Many, if not most, of the Latin books whichpassed under his name in the Middle Ages are spurious,being the original productions of European investigatorswho sought by the prestige attaching to his name togive authority and currency to their own writings. TheArabic originals of his works are rare, and the onlyserious study ofthem which I have met with is containedin the third volume of Berthelot's admirable Histoirede la Chimie au Moyen Age, where the text and Frenchtranslation of one of his genuine treatises are given.Berthelot points out, what, indeed, has long beenrecognized, that though the chief pursuit of the oldalchemists was the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixirof Life, they nevertheless made many real and valuablediscoveries. How many of these we owe to the Arabsis apparent in such words as alcohol, alembic and thelike, still current amongst us. It is indeed generallyrecognized that it was in the domains of chemistry and

1 p. 242.


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1 6 Arabian Medicine. Imateria medica that the Arabs added most to the bodyof scientific doctrine which

they inherited from theGreeks.Of medicine proper we find little trace amongst theArabs at this period, only three or four physicians being

specifically mentioned, mostly Christians, and probablynon-Arabs. One of them was Ibn Uthdl, physician toMu'awiya, the first Umayyad Caliph, who was murderedby a man of the tribe of Makhzum on suspicion of having,at the instigation of the Caliph, poisoned an obnoxiousrelative named 'Abdu'r-Rahman. Another, Abu'l-Hakam, also a Christian, lived to be a centenarian, asdid also his son Hakam. In the case of the latter wehave a fairly detailed account of his successful treatmentof a case of severe arterial haemorrhage caused by anunskilful surgeon-barber. Neither of these men seemsto have written anything, but to 'Isd the son of Hakamis ascribed a large Kunndsk, or treatise on the Art ofMedicine, of which no fragment has been preserved.Mention is also made by the Arab biographers of a cer-tain Theodosius or Theodorus 1 , evidently a Greek, whowas physician to the cruel but capable Hajjaj ibn Yiisuf,by whom he was held in high honour and esteem. Someof his aphorisms are preserved, but none of the threeor four works ascribed to him. The short list of thesemedical practitioners of the Umayyad period is closedby a Bedouin woman named Zaynab, who treated casesof ophthalmia. That somewhat more attention beganto be paid to public health is indicated by the fact re-corded by the historian Tabari 2 that the Caliph al-Walfdin the year 88/707 segregated the lepers, while as-

1 Ibn Abi Usaybi'a (vol. i, pp. 121-123) gives the name in theform of Thiyadhtiq (J^iLo).

2 Secunda Series, vol. ii, p. 1196.


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John Philoponus 1 7signing to them an adequate supply of food. Amongstthe Bedouin the recourse was still to the old charmsand incantations, often accompanied by the applicationto the patient of the operator's saliva. An instance ofthis is recorded in connection with the poet Jarlr 1 , whogave his daughter Umm Ghaylan in marriage to a ma-gician named Ablaq who had cured him in this fashionof erysipelas. The practice of medicine amongst thegenuine Arabs of Arabia, both Bedouin and dwellers intowns, at the present day is succinctly described byZwemer in his book Arabia, the Cradle of Islam*; andhis description, so far as we can judge, fairly representsits condition at the remote period of which we are nowspeaking.One important question demands consideration be-fore we pass on to the great revival of learning underthe early 'Abbasid Caliphs at Baghdad in the eighthand ninth centuries of our era. Leclerc in his Histoirede la Me decine Arabe maintains that already, a centuryearlier, when the Arabs conquered Egypt, the processof assimilating Greek learning began. In this process heassigns an important part to a certain Yahya an-Nahwi,or John the Grammarian, who enjoyed high favourwith 'Amr ibnu'l-'As, the conqueror and first Muslimgovernor of Egypt, and whom he identifies with JohnPhiloponus the commentator of Aristotle. This Yahya,of whom the fullest notice occurs in al-Qifti's Historyof the Philosophers ( Tririkhul-Hukamdtf, was aJacobite bishop at Alexandria, who subsequently re-pudiated the doctrine of the Trinity, and consequentlyattracted the favourable notice of the Muslims, to whosestrict monotheism this doctrine is particularly obnoxious.

1 Sevan's ed. of the Naqd'id, p. 840.2pp. 280-4.

8 Ed. Lippert, pp. 354-7-B. A. M. 2


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1 8 Arabian Medicine. IHe it was, according to the well-known story, nowgenerally

discredited by Orientalists, who was the ulti-mate though innocent cause of the alleged burning ofthe books in the great library at Alexandria by theMuslims, a story which Leclerc, in spite of his strongpro-Arab and pro-Muhammadan sympathies, oddlyenough accepts as a historical fact 1 . This Yahya, atany rate, was a great Greek scholar, and is said by al-Qifti to have mentioned in one of his works the year343 of Diocletian (reckoned from A.D. 284) as the currentyear in which he wrote. This would agree very wellwith his presence in Egypt at the time of the Arabconquest in A.D. 640, but would prove that he was notidentical with John Philoponus, who, according to anote added by Professor Bury to Gibbon's narrative ofthe event in question, flourished not in the seventh butin the early part of the sixth century after Christ 2 . Theprecious library of Alexandria had, as Gibbon observes,been pretty thoroughly destroyed by Christian fanaticsnearly three centuries before the Muslims over- ranEgypt.The questions of the fate of the Alexandrian libraryand the identity of the two Johns or Yahyas are, how-ever, quite subordinate to the much larger and moreimportant question of the state of learning in Egypt atthe time of the Arab conquest. Leclerc's view is thatthe School of Medicine, once so famous, long outlivedthat of Philosophy, and continued, even though muchfallen from its ancient splendour, until the time of the

1 The arguments against the truth of this story are well set forthby L. Krehl ( Uber die Sage von der Verbrennung der AlexandrinischenBibliothek durch die Araber) in the Acts of the Fourth InternationalCongress of Orientalists (Florence, 1880).

- VoL v of Bury's ed, p. 452 ad calc.


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The School ofJundi-Shdptir 1 9Arab conquest. This is a difficult point to decide ; butDr Wallis Budge, whose opinion I sought, definitelytook the view that the Egyptian writings of this periodat any rate, so far as they touched on these topics atall, showed little or no trace of medical science, Greekor other. At the same time we must give due weightto the well-authenticated Arabian tradition as to thetranslation ofGreek works on Alchemy for the Umayyadprince Khalid ibn Yazid in Egypt, and must admit thepossibility, if not the probability, that these translationsincluded other subjects, philosophical, medical and thelike, besides that which constituted the aforesaid prince'sspecial hobby.

Be this as it may, it was in the middle of the eighthcentury of our era and through the then newly-foundedcity of Baghdad that the great stream of Greek andother ancient learning began to pour into the Muham-madan world and to reclothe itself in an Arabian dress.And so far as Medicine is concerned, the tradition ofthe old Sasanian school of Jundi-Shapur was pre-dominant. Of this once celebrated school, now long amere name, with difficulty located by modern travellersand scholars on the site of the hamlet of Shah-abad 1 inthe province of Khuzistan in S.W. Persia, a brief ac-count must now be given.The city owed its foundation to the Sasanianmonarch Shapur I, the son and successor of ArdashirBabakan who founded this great dynasty in the thirdcentury after Christ, and restored, after five centuriesand a half of eclipse, the ancient glories of Achaemenian

1 See Rawlinson's Notes on a March from Zohdb to Khuzistdn inthe Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. ix, pp. 7 1-2, andLayard's remarks in vol. xvi, p. 86 of the same Journal.

22


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2O Arabian Medicine. IPersia. Shapiir, after he had defeated and taken captivethe Emperor Valerian, and sacked the famous city ofAntioch, built, at the place called in Syriac Beth Lapat,a town which he named Veh-az-Andev-i-Shdptir, or Shapur's ' Better than Antioch,' a name which wasgradually converted into Gunde Shdptir or in ArabicJundi Sdbtir1 . Another Better than Antioch wasfounded in the sixth century of our era by Khusraw Anii-sharwan, the Chosroes of the Greeks and Kisra of theArabs, which, to distinguish it from the first, was calledVeh-az-Andev-i-Khusraw. This latter town, by a practicewhich prevailed in Persia even until the sixteenth cen-tury, was chiefly populated by the deported citizensespecially craftsmen and artisans of the foreign townafter which it was named; and it seems likely that Jundi-Shapiir also received a considerable number of Greeksettlers, for the Greek translations of Shapur's Pahlawiinscriptions carved on the rocks at Istakhr in Parsprove that Greek labour was available at this time evenin the interior of Persia. Forty or fifty years later, inthe early part of the fourth century, in the reign of thesecond Shapiir, the city had become a royal residence,and it was there that Mani or Manes, the founder of theManichaean heresy, was put to death, and his skin,stuffed with straw, suspended from one of the city gates,known long afterwards, even in Muhammadan times,as the Gate of Manes. There also, as appearsprobable, Shapiir II established the Greek physicianTheodosius or Theodorus whom he summoned to attendhim, and whose system of medicine is mentioned in the

as one of the Persian books on Medicine after-1 See Th. Noldeke's Gesch. d. Perser u. Arab, zur Zeit der Sasa-

niden (Leyden, 1879), PP- 40-42.2

P- 303-


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The School ofJundi-Shdptir 21wards translated into Arabic and preserved at any rateuntil the tenth century of our era. This physician, whowas a Christian, obtained such honour and considerationin Persia that Shapiir caused a church to be built forhim and at his request set free a number of his captivecountrymen.The great development ofthe school ofJundi-Shapurwas, however, the unforeseen and unintended result ofthat Byzantine intolerance which in the fifth centuryof our era drove the Nestorians from their school atEdessa and forced them to seek refuge in Persian terri-tory. In the following century the enlightened andwisdom-loving Khusraw Amisharwan, the protector oftheexiled Neo-Platonist philosophers 1 , sent his physicianBurzuya to India, who, together with the game of chessand the celebrated Book of Kaltta andDimna, broughtback Indian works on medicine and also, apparently,Indian physicians to Persia.The school of Jundi-Shapur was, then, at the timeof the Prophet Muhammad's birth, at the height of itsglory. There converged Greek and Oriental learning,the former transmitted in part directly through Greekscholars, but for the most part through the industriousand assimilative Syrians, who made up in diligencewhat they lacked in originality. Sergius of Ra'su'l-'Ayn,who flourished a little before this time 2, was one of thosewho translated Hippocrates and Galen into Syriac. Ofthis intermediate Syriac medical literature, from whichmany, perhaps most, of the Arabic translations of theeighth and ninth centurieswere made, not much survives,but M. H. Pognon's edition and French translation ofa Syriac version of the Aphorisms* of Hippocrates, and

1 About A.D. 531. 2 He died at Constantinople about A.D. 536.3 Une Version Syriaquedes Aphorismes d?Hippocrate, Leipzig, 1903.


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22 Arabian Medicine. IDr Wallis Budge's Syriac Book of Medicines*, enable usto form some idea of its

quality.To the

Syrians,what-

ever their defects, and especially to the Nestorians,Asia owes much, and the written characters of theMongol, Manchu, Uyghur and many other peoples inthe western half of Asia testify to the literary influenceof the Aramaic peoples.But though the medical teaching of Jundi-Shapurwas in the main Greek, there was no doubt an under-lying Persian element, especially in Pharmacology,where the Arabic nomenclature plainly reveals in manycases Persian origins. Unfortunately the two mostglorious periods of pre- Islamic Persia, the Achaemenian(B.C. 550-330) and the Sasanian (A.D. 226-640) bothterminated in a disastrous foreign invasion, Greek inthe first case, Arab in the second, which involved thewholesale destruction of the indigenous learning andliterature, so that it is impossible for us to reconstitutemore than the main outlines of these two ancientcivilizations. Yet the Avesta, the sacred book of theZoroastrians, speaks of three classes of healers, byprayers and religious observances, by diet and drugs,and by instruments; in other words priests, physiciansand surgeons. As regards the latter, one curious passagein the Vendiddd ordains that the tyro must operatesuccessfully on three unbelievers before he may attemptan operation on one of the good Mazdayasnianreligion. And, of course, Greek physicians, of whomCtesias is the best known, besides an occasional Egyp-tian, were to be found at the Achaemenian court beforethe time of Alexander of Macedon.

The medical school of Jundi-Shapur seems to havebeen little affected by the Arab invasion and conquest1 Two vols., text and translation, 1913.


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The Bukht -Yishti'' Family 23of the seventh century of our era, but it was not till thelatter half of the eighth century, when Baghdad becamethe metropolis of Islam, that its influence began to bewidely exerted on the Muslims. It was in the yearA.D. 765 x that the second 'Abbasid Caliph al-Mansiir,being afflicted with an illness which baffled his medicaladvisers, summoned to attend him Jurjis the son ofBukht-Yishu'(a half- Persian, half-Syriac name, meaningJesus hath delivered ) 2, the chief physician of the greathospital of Jundi-Shapiir. Four years later Jurjis fellill and craved permission to return home, to see hisfamily and children, and, should he die, to be buriedwith his fathers. The Caliph invited him to embracethe religion of Islam, but Jurjis replied that he preferredto be with his fathers, whether in heaven or hell. Thereatthe Caliph laughed and said, Since I saw thee I havefound relief from the maladies to which I had been ac-customed, and he dismissed him with a gift of 10,000dindrs, and sent with him on his journey an attendantwho should convey him, living or dead, to Jundi-Shapur,the Civitas H ippocratica which he loved so well. Jurjison his part promised to send to Baghdad to replace himone of his pupils named 'fsa ibn Shahla, but declined tosend his son, Bukht-Yishu* the second, on the groundthat he could not be spared from the Bimdristdn, orhospital, of Jundi-Shapiir.For six generations and over 250 years the Bukht-Yishu' family remained pre-eminent in medicine, thelast (Jibra'fl son of 'Ubaydu'llah son of Bukht-Yishii'son of Jibra'il son of Bukht-Yishu' son of Jurjis son of

1 Al-Qiftf's Ta'rikhu'l-Hukamd, p. 158.2 The explanation of these old Persian names beginning or ending

with -bukht we owe to Professor Th. Noldeke, Gesch. d. Artakhshir-i-Pdpakdn y p. 49, n. 4.


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24 Arabian Medicine. IJibra'fl), who died on April 10, 1006, being as eminentand as highly honoured by the rulers and nobles of histime as the first. That a certain exclusiveness and un-willingness toimpart theirknowledgetostrangerscharac-terized the physicians of Jundi-Shapur may be inferredfrom the treatment received at the beginning of hiscareer by the celebrated translator of Greek medicalworks into Arabic, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, known to medi-eval Europe as Johannitius. He was a Christian ofHi'ra with a great passion for knowledge, and acted asdispenser to Yuhanna ibn Masawayh (the Messues ofthe Latino- Barbari), whose lectures he also followed.But hewas prone to ask too many troublesome questions,and one day his master, losing patience, exclaimed,What have the people of Hi'ra to do with medicine ?Go and change money in the streets and drove himforth in tears; for, says al-Qifti 1 , these people ofJundi-Shapiir used to believe that they only were worthyof this science, and would not suffer it to go forth fromthemselves, their children and their kin. But Hunayn,more resolved than ever on pursuing knowledge to itssource, went away for several years to learn Greek.During this period one of his former acquaintances,Yiisuf the physician, one day saw a man with long hair,and undipped beard and moustaches reciting Homerin the street, and, in spite of his changed appearance,recognized his voice as that of Hunayn. He, beingquestioned, admitted his identity, but enjoined silenceon Yiisuf, saying that he had sworn not to continue hismedical studies until he had perfected himself in know-ledge of the Greek language. When he finally returned,Jibra'il ibn Bukht-Yishu', to whom he attached himself,was delighted with his Greek scholarship and declared

1 Op. tit., p. 174.


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Hunayn ibn Ishdq ( Jokannitius } 25him to be a miracle of learning, and Ibn Masawayh,who had formerly driven him out with contumely, soughtYusuf's good offices to effect a reconciliation with him.Later he gained high favour with the Caliph, who, how-ever, was minded first to prove his professional honourby a hard test, for he bade him concoct a poison forone of his enemies, offering him rich rewards if hewould do so, but severe punishment imprisonment ordeath if he refused. He refused and was imprisonedfor a year, when he was again brought before theCaliph and bidden to choose again between complianceand a rich reward, or the sword of the executioner. Ihave already told the Commander of the Faithful,replied Hunayn, that I have skill only in what is bene-ficial, and have studied naught else

; and being againthreatened with instant death he added, I have a Lordwho will give me my right to-morrow in the Supreme

Uprising, so if the Caliph would injure his own soul, lethim do so. Then the Caliph smiled and declared thathe had only desired to assure himself of Hunayn'sprobity before yielding him implicit confidence. So theincident ended satisfactorily, but it serves to show thatthe position of Court Physician at Baghdad in early'Abbasid times was sometimes a trying one ; a factbrought out in the well-known story of the physicianDiiban and King Yunan (which, however, had a muchmore tragic ending) in the Arabian Nights*.

Hunayn was not only the most celebrated but themost productive of these translators. Of the ten H ippo-cratic writings mentioned by the author of the Fihristas existing in Arabic translations in his time, seven werehis work and three the work of his pupil 'Isa ibn Yahya,while the sixteen books of Galen were all translated by

1 Lane's translation (London, 1859), vol. i, pp. 83-6.


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26 Arabian Medicine. Ihim or his pupil Hubaysh. Generally, as we learn fromthe Fihrist 1 , Hunayn translated the Greek into Syriac,while Hubaysh translated from Syriac into Arabic, theArabic version being then revised by Hunayn, who,however, sometimes translated directly from Greek intoArabic. All three languages were known to most ofthese translators, and it is probable, as Leclerc suggests,that whether the translation was made into Syriac orArabic depended on whether it was primarily designedfor Christian or Muslim readers. At the present daycomparatively few of these Arabic translations are avail-able, even in manuscript ; but good MSS. of the Aphor-isms* and Prognostics* exist in the British Museum,besides an epitome of the sixteen books of Galen 4ascribed toYahyaan-Nahwf,or John the Grammarian.Of the Aphorisms in Arabic there is an Indian litho-graphed edition, which, however, I have not seen. Thisdearth of texts is very unfortunate for the student ofArabian Medicine, who is thereby much hampered inthe solution of two important preliminary questions,viz. the accuracy

and fidelity of these early Arabictranslations, and the development of the Arabic medicalterminology, often unintelligible without reference tothe Greek original. As regards the first question,Leclerc 8 is apparently right in his opinion that the trans-lation from Greek into Arabic was generally effected withmuch greater skill and knowledge than the later transla-tion from Arabic into Latin, and that he who judgesArabian Medicine only by the latter will inevitably under-value it and do it a great injustice. Indeed it is difficult

1 p. 289.2 Or. 5914, Or. 6419, Or. 5820, Or. 6386, and Or. 5939.3 Or. 5914. 4 Arundel, Or. 17.5Hist, de la Mldecine Arabe, vol. ii, pp. 346-8.


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The so-called Sabaeans ofHarrdn 27to resist the conclusion that many passages in the Latinversion of the Qdnun of Avicenna were misunderstoodor not understood at all by the translator, and conse-quently can never have conveyed a clear idea to thereader.

Another group of great translators from Greek intoArabic was provided by the city of Harrdn, the classicalCharrae, which remained pagan down to the thirteenthcentury, and, by reason of the high degree of Greekculture long maintained there, was known as Helleno-polis. How the inhabitants of this city came to beknown as Sabaeans from the ninth century onwards,though they had nothing to do with the true Sabaeansof Chaldaea (ofwhom a remnant, known to the Muham-madans as al-Mughtasila from their frequent ceremonialbathings and washings, and to Europeans, for the samereason, as Christians of St John the Baptist, exist tothe present day near Basra and along the banks of theShattu'l-'Arab), is a very curious story, exhaustively setforth, with full documentary evidence, by Chwolsonin his great work Die Ssabier und Ssabismus 1. Of theselearned Harranians the most celebrated were Thabitibn Qurra (born A.D. 836, died A.D. 901), his sonsIbrahim and Sinan, his grandsons Thabit and Ibrahim,and his great-grandson Sinan; and the family of Zahrun.Mention should also be made of another contemporarytranslator, though his predilection was for mathematicsrather than medicine, Qusta ibn Luqa, a Christian ofBaalbek in Syria, who died about A.D. 923.Thus by the tenth century the Muslims, to all ofwhom, irrespective of race, Arabic was not only thelanguage of Revelation and Religion, but also of science,diplomacy and polite intercourse, had at their disposal

1 St Petersburg, 1856 (2 vols.). See vol. i, ch. vi (pp. 139-157).


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28 Arabian Medicine. Ia great mass of generally excellent translations of allthe most famous philosophical and scientific writings ofthe Greeks. For Greek poetry and drama they caredlittle, and of the Latin writers they seem to have knownnothing whatever. Of the Greek medical writers, besidesHippocrates and Galen, their favourites were Rufus ofEphesus, Oribasius, Paul of .^Egina, and Alexander ofTralles; and, for materia medica, Dioscorides. In somecases Greek writings, lost in the original, have been pre-served to us in Arabic translations. The most notableinstance of this is afforded by the seven books of Galen'sAnatomy (ix-xv), lost in the original Greek but pre-served in the Arabic, of which the text, with Germantranslation and {-^apparatus criticus, has been publishedby Dr Max Simon 1 , with an admirable Arabic-Greek-German vocabulary of technical terms, to which re-ference has already been made.Were the materials accessible, it would be interestingto compare those Arabic translations made directly fromthe Greek with those which first passed through themedium of Syriac. Ofthe few Syriac versions preservedto us I cannot myself form an opinion, being unfortu-nately unacquainted with that language, but they arerather harshly judged by M. Pognon, of whose editionand translation of the Syriac Aphorisms of HippocratesI have already spoken 2 . The Syriac version of theAphorisms contained in my manuscript, he writes,is a very faithful, or rather too faithful, translation ofthe Greek text; sometimes, indeed, it is a literal trans-lation absolutely devoid of sense. This, unfortunately,does not allow us to determine the epoch at which it

1 Sieben Biicher Anatomic des Galen, u.s.w., 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1906).2 Une Version Syriaque des Aphorismes d'Hippocrate, texte et tra-

duction, par M. Pognon, Consul de France a Akp (Leipzig, 1903).


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Limitations of the Syrian Translators 29was made, since to render too literally has been thedefect of many Syrian translators.

I will not venture to say, he continues, that theSyrians never possessed clear translations written in acorrect style, but in most of the translations which havereached us the style is often obscure, the constructionincorrect, and words are often employed in a sense notproperly belonging to them, this generally arising fromthe desire of the Syriac translator to reproduce theGreek text too faithfully. The Syrian translators, whenthey found a difficult passage, too often contented them-selves with rendering each Greek word by a Syriacword without in any way seeking to write an intelligiblesentence. Thus we find in their translations manyincorrect sentences, and even expressions which haveabsolutely no meaning. In short, I believe that whenthey did not understand the meaning of a Greek word,the translators did not hesitate to transcribe it in Syriaccharacters, leaving their readers to conjecture themeaning of these barbarisms which they had created.The translation of the Aphorisms, with which he isspecially concerned, M. Pognon characterizes as de-testable, and adds: Whenever the translator comesacross an obscure passage, his translation is obscure;and whenever he meets with a passage which is suscep-tible of several different renderings, his translation canbe interpreted in several different ways. This assertionhe proves by numerous examples.The Arab mind, on the other hand, is clear andpositive, and the Arabic language nervous, virile andrich both actually and potentially. The old Arabs werean acute and observant people, and for all natural objectswhich fell under their notice they had appropriate andfinely differentiated words. To render the medical


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3O Arabian Medicine, fworks of the Greeks into their own language they had,of course, in many cases, to invent new terms translatedor imitated from the Greek, and often only to be under-stood by reference to the Greek originals; but theyalreadypossessed a fairly copious anatomical vocabulary,which, moreover, they were fond of using in ordinarylife, even in their poetry. Thus the Umayyad CaliphYazfd ibn 'Abdu'l-Malik, who, in 105/723-4, died oflove for the slave-girl Habbaba, was deeply stirred byher singing of the following verse 1 :

Between the clavicles and the uvula is a burning heatWhich cannot be appeased or swallowed down and cooled

The poet al-Mutanabbi (tenth century) has a poem 2on a fever by which he was attacked in Egypt inDhu'l-Hijja 348 (February 960), and which left him

Sick of body, unable to rise up, vehemently intoxicated (i.e. delirious)without wine.

He compares the fever to a coy maiden who willonly visit him under cover of darkness :

U9 ' LjllaJJ j OjUaJI

-,..^aJI ^j

U-Fakhri, ed. Ahlwardt, p. 155.2 Ed. Dieterici, pp. 675-680.


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Al-Mutanabbt's Ode to a Fever

, jutf 131 'Js,*V is as though she who visits me werefilled with modesty,For she does notpay her visits save under cover of darkness.Ifreely offered her my linen and my pillows,But she refused them, and spent the night in my bones.My skin is too contracted to contain both my breath and her,

So she relaxes it with all sorts of sickness.When she leaves me, she washes me \with perspiration]As though we had retired apartfor someforbidden action.It is as though the morning drives her away,And her lachrymal ducts areflooded in theirfour channels.I watchfor her time \pf arrival] without desire,Yet with the watchfulness of the eager lover.And she is everfaithful to her appointed time, butfaithfulness is an evilWhen it casts thee into grievous sufferings.Under such astonishing imagery are clearly depicted

the delirium and regular nightly recurrence of the fever,the rigors which mark its onset, and the copiousperspiration with which it concludes, the latter beingfantastically likened to the weeping of a woman tornfrom her lover's arms.

That in the days of the Caliphate every educatedperson was expected to take some interest in Medicineand to know something about Anatomy is shown by thecurious story of the equally fair and talented slave-girlTawaddud in the Arabian Nights. The girl is offeredto the Caliph Harunu'r-Rashid for an enormous price(10,000 dinars) by her bankrupt master Abu'1-Husn, andthe Caliph agrees to pay this sum provided she cananswer satisfactorily any questions addressed to her bythose most learned in each of the many branches ofknowledge in which she claims to excel. Therefore themost notable professors of Theology, Law, Exegesis


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32 Arabian Medicine. Iof the Qur'dn, Medicine, Astronomy, Philosophy,Rhetoric and Chess examine her in succession, and ineach case she not only gives satisfactory replies to alltheir questions, but ends by putting to each of them aquestion which he is unable to answer. Lane describesthis story, which provides material for six of the 1001Nights 1 , as extremely tiresome to most readers, but itis very valuable as indicating what was regarded by themedieval Muslims as a good all-round education. Themedical portion of the examination includes the outlinesofAnatomy and Physiology, according to Arabian ideas,diagnosis from signs and symptoms, humoristic Patho-logy, Hygiene, Dietetics and the like. The enumerationof the bones is fairly complete, but that of the blood-vessels very vague. Of the branches of the Aorta, saysTawaddud, none knoweth the tale save He whocreated them, but it is said that they number 360 amystical number, 1 2 x 30, which still plays a great partin the doctrines of certain Muhammadan sects, by whomit is called The Number of All Things (&, j, AJ*)for reasons which it would be tedious to enumerate inthis place.

I have already taken up too much of your time thisafternoon in the discussion of these preliminaries. Inmy next lecture I propose to speak of four of the mostnotable early medical writers of the Muslims whosucceeded the epoch of the great translators. These wereall Persians by race, though they wrote in Arabic; andthe Latin versions of the chief works of three of them,known to the Latino-Barbari as Rhazes, Haly Abbasand Avicenna, constituted three of the most highlyesteemed medical works current in medieval Europe.

1 Nights 449-454; ed. Macnaghten, vol. ii, pp. 512-521; Sir R.Burton's translation, vol. v, pp. 218-227.


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LECTURE IIIN my last lecture I traced the growth of the so-calledArabian Medicine down to the ninth century of ourera, the time of the great translators of the early'Abbasid period ; and I showed how, by their diligenceand learning, the teachings of the most eminent physi-cians of Ancient Greece, notably Hippocrates, Galen,Oribasius, Rufus of Ephesus and Paul of ^Egina, wererendered accessible to the Muslim world. We must nowpass to the independent Arabic writers on medicine,who, starting from this foundation, compiled more orless original works embodying, to some extent, observa-tions of their own, and arranged on their own plan.The great extent of the subject, however, obliges me toimpose on myself somewhat strict limitations of region,period and topic, and I shall therefore confine myselfto the two centuries immediately succeeding the GoldenAge, which lies between A.D. 750 and 850, and to theEastern lands of the Caliphate, especially Persia.Further, I shall confine myself to four or five of theprincipal medical writers of this limited period, and, asa rule, to one only of the works of each. Even undersuch limitations only a very partial and superficial viewcan be obtained, for a whole series of lectures mightevidently be devoted to a single section of any one ofthe works which I propose briefly to discuss to-day.

Before proceeding further, however, there are oneor two preliminary matters on which a few words shouldbe said, and first of all as to the evolution of Arabicscientific terminology. The Syrians, as we have seen,were too much disposed to transcribe Greek words asB. A. M. 3


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34 Arabian Medicine. IIthey stood, without any attempt at elucidation, leavingthe reader to make the best he could of them. Themedieval Latin translators from the Arabic did exactlythe same, and the Latin Qdntin of Avicenna swarmswith barbarous words which are not merely transcrip-tions, but in many cases almost unrecognizable mis-transcriptions, of Arabic originals. Thus the coccyx isnamed in Arabic 'ufus (^.J^), or, with the definitearticle, al-us fu$ (^Julijt), which appears in the Latinversion as alhosos\ al-qatan (,^iJui), the lumbar region,appears as alckatim\ al-'ajuz or al-'ajiz (j***M)> thesacrum, variously appears as alhauis and al-hagiazi;and an-nawdjidh (juU^Jt), the wisdom-teeth, as nuagedor neguegidi. Dozens of similar monstrosities can begleaned from Dr Hyrtl's Das Arabische und Hebraischein der Anatomic (Vienna, 1879), and it must be con-fessed that the Arabs also were, in a lesser degree,guilty of a similar mutilation of Greek words, as, forexample, the transformation of a//,i/eios into an/as(u~^0> which in turn, in the hands ofthe Latino- Barbari,became abgas.Generally, however, in spite of the fact that theArabic language almost entirely lacks the Greek facilityof forming compound words to express new and com-plex ideas, the Arabs succeeded in paraphrasing theGreek technical terms with fair success. Diagnosis isfairly rendered by tashkhis, which primarily means theidentification of a person (shakhs) ; prognosis is morecumbrously rendered by taqdimatu l-ma'rifati, literally,the sending forward of knowledge. In the earliestArabic medical books, like the Firdawsul-Hikmat,or Paradise of Wisdom, of which I shall speakimmediately, strange Syro-Persian words, probablyborrowed from the vocabulary of Jundi-Shapiir, and


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Evolution of Arabic Terminology 35subsequently replaced by good Arabic equivalents,appear. Thus in the almost unique MS. of the workjust mentioned there twice occurs a word for a headacheaffecting the whole head (as contrasted with shaqfqa,which denotes hemicrania or migraine), faultily writtenin both cases (once as Ijj^ and once as tijy-), whichonly after numerous enquiries of Syriac scholars wasidentified as the Syriac sanwarta (r^^vicuoo), said to bea Persian word meaning primarily a helmet. And in factit is evidently the Persian sar-band (ju-) or sar-wandwith transposition of the r and the n (san-ward for sar-wand) and the addition of the Syriac final emphatic a.This may serve as an instance of the kind of troublewhich the reader or translator, or still more the editor,of these old Arabic medical works is apt to meet with,for of scarcely any, even of the few which have beenpublished in the original, do critical editions exist.On the other hand, apart from the fairly copiousanatomical, pathologicaland medical vocabularyproperlybelonging to the Arabic language, it has a great powerof forming significant derivatives from existing roots,which, when formed, are at once intelligible. Thus thereexists in Arabic a special form for the noun of pain,wherein the first root-letter is followed by a short u andthe second by a long a (the form known to Arabgrammarians as j&,fu ldl), and this is the form assumedby the names of most diseases and ailments; as thealready mentioned sudd (cU-i), a splitting headache,the soda of the Latino-Barbari; zukdm (>l>j), acatarrh ; judhdm (1jJ-)> elephantiasis, etc. On thisanalogy we get, from the root dawr (jj>), revolving,duwdr (jlji), vertigo, the sickness produced by beingwhirled round; from bahr (j^Lo), the sea,


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36 Arabian Medicine. IIsea-sickness ; from khamr (^*.), wine, khumdr(jU*.).

the headache resulting from undue indulgencein wine; and so forth. I never met with the wordjubdl (jCl) from/ado/ (j^.), a mountain, but, if I didmeet with it, I should know that it could mean nothingelse but mountain-sickness. In other cases the Arabictechnical term implies a pathological theory, as, for.. / ** * * \ / 'j\example, istisqd ( UuJLJJ, mustasq{\^~> >Y which arerespectively the verbal noun and the active participleof the tenth, or desiderative, conjugation of the root(* ' * *'\Lsf* ** U* */ to giye drink to, and inordinary language mean craving for drink and onewho craves for drink, but in Medicine dropsy anddropsical, conformably to the familiar Latin adage,Crescit indulgens sibi dims hydrops. Thus it will beapparent that Arabic is on the whole well adapted forproviding a suitable technical terminology, which, infact, it has done for the whole Muslim world, whetherthey speak Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu, and which,as the modern Egyptian Press testifies, it continues todo at the present day.Another point deserving brief notice is the questionwhether dissection was ever practised by the Muslims.The answer is usually given in the negative, and Imust admit that I incline to this view; but in an immense,unfinished, modern Persian biographical dictionary en-titled Ndma-i-Ddniskwardn, the Book of LearnedMen, compiled by command of the late Nasiru'd-DmShah by four learned men, to wit Mirza Abu'1-Fadl ofSawa the physician, Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi 'Abdu'r-Rabb-abadi, entitled Skamsul-'Ulamd, Mirza. Hasan-i-Talaqani, entitled Adib, and Mirza 'Abdu'l-Wahhabibn 'Abdu'l-'AH of Qazwin, and lithographed at Tihran


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Dissection in Muslim Lands 3725 years ago, it is stated 1 that the celebrated Yuhannaibn Masawayh, being unable to obtain human subjects,dissected apes in a special dissecting-room which he builton the banks of the Tigris, and that a particular speciesof ape, considered to resemble man most closely, was,by command of the Caliph al-Mu'tasim, supplied to himabout the year A.D. 836 by the ruler of Nubia. Thisstory is given on the authority of Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, inwhose Classes of Physicians* it in fact occurs in a lessclear and detailed form. It is, however, not to be foundin al-Qifti's History of the Philosophers, and cannot, Ifear, be regarded as affording weighty evidence as tothe practice of dissection in the medical schools of theArabs. This Yuhanna ibn Masawayh had a bad temperand a sharp tongue. According to the Fihrist he oncesaid to a courtier who had annoyed him, If theignorance wherewith thou art afflicted were convertedinto understanding, and then divided amongst a hundredbeetles, each one of them would be more sagacious thanAristotleTo come now to the medical writers of whom I

pro-pose to speak this afternoon, the oldest of them is 'Allibn Rabban of Tabaristan, the Persian province southof the Caspian Sea. Rabban, as he himself explains atthe beginning of his book, was the title, not the name,of his father.

My father, he says, was the son of a certainscribe of the city of Merv...who had a great zeal forthe pursuit of virtue... and sought to derive benefit frombooks on Medicine and Philosophy, preferring Medicineto the profession of his fathers. Herein his object wasnot so much to seek after praise and profit as to con-form himself to the Divine Attributes, and so to earn

1 Vol. ii, pp. 37-8. 2 Vol. i, p. 178 of the Cairo ed.


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38 Arabian Medicine. IIthe consideration of mankind. Wherefore he receivedthe title of Rabban, which being interpreted signifies'our Master' and 'our Teacher.'

From this title we may infer that our author's fatherwas a Christian or a Jew, and in fact al-Qifti 1 , who givesa short notice of him, says that he professed the latterreligion ; that the father's proper name was Sahl, andthat the son only made profession of Islam after heentered the service of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil. Pre-viously to this he had been secretary to the celebratedMazyar, of the noble Persian house of Qaren, whorebelled against the Caliph in the hope of liberating hiscountry from the Arab yoke, and was finally capturedand crucified at Baghdad beside the heresiarch Babak.'Ali ibn Rabban subsequently entered the service ofthe Caliph, and finally, in the third year of his reign(A.D. 850), succeeded, after many interruptions, in com-pleting the work on Medicine and Natural Philosophyon which he had long been engaged, and which heentitled Firdawsul-Hikmat, the Paradise of Wisdom.This is nearly all that is known of his life, except thatfrom an illustration given in his book 2 it is evident thathe was, as his nisba implies, familiar with the mountainsand mists of Tabaristan, and the much more importantfact that he was one of the teachers of the greatphysician ar-Razi or Rhazes, a fact which in itself in-vests his work with considerable interest. Accordingto the Fihrist* he only wrote four books, of which theParadise of Wisdom is the most important. It mustat one time have been well known and highly esteemed,for, as we learn from Yaqiit's Dictionary of LearnedMen*, the great historian Muhammad ibn Jarfr at-

1 p. 231. 2 Brit. Mus. MS. Arundel, Or. 41, f. 150.3 p. 296. 4 E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, vi, 6, p. 429.


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The Paradise of Wisdom 39Tabari was reading it while he lay sick in bed; whilein another passage of the same work 1 , where thateminent patron of letters the Sahib Isma'il ibn 'Abbadis censured for imagining himself to be superior to allthe greatest authorities in every science and art, theFirdaws,or Paradise, of 'All ibn Rabban 2 is mentionedamongst those authorities. Subsequently this book,like so many other precious Arab works, became almostextinct, and at the present day, so far as I can ascertain,there exist only two manuscripts of it, one fine old copy(Arundel, Or. 41) in the British Museum, which I havehad photographed for my use ; and another (Landberg,266) at Berlin ; but this latter copy seems, so far as I havebeen able to learn, to be only an abridgment, or at leastto contain a somewhat mutilated or abbreviated text.

The Paradise of Wisdom, which I hope someday to edit and perhaps translate, deals chiefly withMedicine, but also to some extent with Philosophy,Meteorology, Zoology, Embryology, Psychology andAstronomy. It is a fair-sized book containing nearly550 pages, and is divided into 7 parts (Naw 1), 30 dis-courses (Maqdla), and 360 chapters. The authormentions as his principal sources Hippocrates, Aristotle,Galen, Yuhanna ibn Masawayh (Messues) and Hunaynthe Interpreter, i.e. Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the medievalJohannitius. The fourth and last Discourse of theseventh Part contains in 36 chapters a summary ofIndian Medicine. It would be tedious to you if I wereto read out the abstract of the contents of the bookwhich I have made, nor would the author himself haveapproved such a procedure, for he says:He who perpends this book with understanding

1 E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, vi, 2, p. 279.2 The text erroneously has ^jj (Zayri) for &jj (Rabban).


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4O Arabian Medicine. IIresembles one who wanders in fruitful and pleasantgardens, or in the markets of great cities, wherein isprovided for each of the senses its pleasure and delight.But just as he who limits his knowledge of such gardensand cities to the contemplation of their gates is as onewho seeth naught of them, so he who enumerates thechapters of this my book without attentively readingwhat is contained in each, doth not understand the truemeaning of what I say.... But he who masters this book,and fully fathoms and perpends it, will find in it thegreater part of what the young graduate needs of theScience of Medicine and the action of the natural forcesin this Microcosm and also in the Macrocosm.

Some justification is perhaps needed for renderingthe Arabic word mutakharrij in the above passage inits modern sense of graduate, which may seem toodefinite a translation of a word implying one who comesout, or issues forth, from a school or college at whichhe has completed his studies. It is therefore worthnoting that some sort of qualifying examination inmedicine, if it did not already exist in A.D. 850, whenour author wrote, was instituted 80 years later in thereign of the Caliph al-Muqtadir on account of a case ofmalpraxis which came to his notice in A.D. 931. Hethereupon issued an order, as al-Qifti informs us 1 , thatnone should practise medicine in Baghdad unless he wasable to satisfy Sinan ibn Thabit of Harran of his com-petence and proficiency, with the exception of a fewphysicians of recognized standing, who, on account oftheir reputation, were exempted from this test, to whichthe remainder, numbering some 860, had to submit.That the examination was not always of a very searchingcharacter is shown by the following incident. Amongst

1Tdrikhu'l-Hukamd, pp. 191-2.


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A lenient Oral Examination 41the practitioners who presented themselves before Sinanwas a dignified and well-dressed old man of imposingappearance. Sinan accordingly treated him with con-sideration and respect, and addressed to him variousremarks on the cases before him. When the other can-didates had been dismissed, he said, I should like tohear from the Shaykh (Professor) something which Imay remember from him, and that he should mentionwho was his Teacher in the Profession. Thereupon theold gentleman laid a packet of money before Sinan andsaid, I cannot read or write well, nor have I read any-thing systematically, but I have a family whom I main-tain by my professional labours, which, therefore, I begyou not to interrupt. Sinan laughed and replied, Oncondition that you do not treat any patient with whatyou know nothing about, and that you do not prescribephlebotomy or any purgative drug save for simpleailments. This, said the old man, has been mypractice all my life, nor have I ever ventured beyondsirkangabfn (oxymel) and julldb (jalap). Next dayamongst those who presented themselves before Sinanwas a well-dressed young man of pleasing and intelligentappearance. With whom did you study? enquiredSinan. With my father, answered the youth. Andwho is your father? asked Sinan. The old gentlemanwho was with you yesterday, replied the other. Afine old gentleman exclaimed Sinan; and do youfollow his methods ?...Yes ?...Then see to it that youdo not go beyond them

Although, as I have said, a detailed statement of thecontents of the Paradise of Wisdom would be outof place, the general plan of the book may be brieflyindicated.


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42 Arabian Medicine. IIPART I. Treats of certain general philosophical ideas,the categories, natures, elements, metamorphosis,

genesis and decay.PART II. Treats of embryology, pregnancy, the func-tions and morphology of different organs, ages andseasons, psychology, the external and internalsenses, the temperaments and emotions, personalidiosyncrasies, certain nervous affections (tetanus,torpor, palpitation, nightmare, etc.), the evil eye,hygiene and dietetics.PART III. Treats of nutrition and dietetics.

PART IV. (The longest, comprising 1 2 Discourses) treatsof general and special pathology, from the headto the feet, and concludes with an account of thenumber of muscles, nerves and veins, and disserta-tions on phlebotomy, the pulse and urinoscopy.PART V. Treats of tastes, scents and colours.PART VI. Treats of materia medica and toxicology.PART VII. Treats of climate, waters and seasons intheir relation to health, outlines of cosmographyand astronomy, and the utility of the science ofmedicine: and concludes, as already noted, with asummary of Indian Medicine in 36 chapters.It will be noticed that the book contains very littleabout anatomy or surgery and a great deal about climate,

diet and drugs, including poisons. Part I V, dealing withpathology, is on the whole the most interesting, and Imay, perhaps, be permitted to enumerate more fully thecontents of the 1 2 Discourses which it comprises :Discourse i (9 chapters) on general pathology, the

signs and symptoms of internal disorders, and theprinciples of therapeutics.

Discourse 2 (14 chapters) on diseases and injuries ofthe head ; and diseases of the brain, including epi-lepsy, various kinds of headache, tinnitus, vertigo,amnesia, and nightmare.


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44 Arabian Medicine. IIchief signs and symptoms of each disease and the treat-ment recommended, and, so far as I have seen, thereare no references to actual cases, or clinical notes. Thebook, indeed, except for the First Part which dealswith general philosophic conceptions, and contains someinteresting ideas regarding the genesis of the FourElements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water) from the FourNatures (Heat, Cold, Dryness and Moisture) and theirmetamorphosis (*JU^t) is little more than a Prac-titioner's Vade-mecum, chiefly interesting as one of theearliest extant independent medical works in Arabicwritten by the teacher of the great physician whom wehave now to consider.

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya of Ray, hencecalled in Arabic ar-Razi, and by the medieval Latinists Rhazes, was probably the greatest and most originalof all the Muslim physicians, and one of the most prolificas an author. His birth-place, Ray, situated a few milesfrom Tihrdn, the modern capital of Persia, was one ofthe most ancient Persian cities, being mentioned in theAvesta 1 as Ragha of the three races, the twelfth ofthe good lands created by Ahura Mazda. In early lifemusic was his chief interest, and he was a skilful playeron the lute. He then devoted himself to Philosophy,but, according to the Qadi Sa'id 2 , did not fathomMetaphysics, nor apprehend its ultimate aim, so thathis judgment was troubled and he adopted indefensibleviews, espoused objectionable [i.e. heterodox] doctrines,and criticized people whom he did not understand, andwhose methods he did not follow. Herein he standsin sharp contrast with Avicenna, ofwhom we shall speak

1 Vendtddd, Fargard ii, v. 16.2 Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, i, p. 310.


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A r-Rdzi ( ' 'Rhazes } 45presently ; for Avicenna was a better philosopher thanphysician, but Razi a better physician than philosopher.

Rdzi, as Ibn Abi Usaybi'a informs us, spent most ofhis life in Persia, because it was his native country, andbecause his brother and his kinsmen dwelt there. Hisinterest in Medicine was aroused, when he was ofmature age, by visits to the hospital and conversationswith an old druggist or dispenser who served in it. Ofthe hospital at Ray he ultimately became chiefphysician,and there he attended regularly, surrounded by hispupils and the pupils of his pupils. Every patient whopresented himself was first examined by the latter theclinical clerks, as we should say ; and if the case provedtoo difficult for them it was passed on to the Master'simmediate pupils, and finally, if necessary, to himself.Subsequently Razi became physician-in-chief to thegreat hospital at Baghdad, about the foundation ofwhichhe is said to have been consulted. Being asked toselect the most suitable site, he is said to have causedpieces of meat to be hung up in different quarters of thecity, and to have chosen the place where they wereslowest in showing signs of decomposition. While inPersia he enjoyed the friendship and patronage ofMansiir ibn Ishaq, the ruler of Khurasan, for whomhe composed his Kit&bu l-Manstiri (the Liber Al-mansoris ). The chronology of his life is very uncer-tain, for not only do the dates assigned to his deathvary between A.D. 903 and 92 3 ] but he has even beenassociated by some writers 2 with the great Buwayhid

1 Ibn Abi Usaybi'a, i, p. 314.2 Ibid., pp. 309-310, but the author expresses the correct opinion

that Razf was antecedent to 'Adudu'd-Dawla, and that the hospitalwith which he was connected only received the name of 'Adudi at alater date.


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Writings ofAr-Rdzi 47oldest authority, enumerates 113 major and 28 minorworks by him, besides two poems. Most of these arelost, but what remain are amply sufficient to enable usto appraise his learning, though even of these but feware accessible save in manuscript. Of his many mono-graphs the most celebrated in Europe is his well-knowntreatise on small-pox and measles, first published in theoriginal Arabic with a Latin translation by Channing(London, 1766). Of this a Latin translation had alreadyappeared in Venice in 1565, and an English versionby Greenhill was published by the Sydenham Societyin 1848. This tract was formerly known as de Peste orde Pestilentid, and, as Neuburger says 1 , on everyhand and with justice it is regarded as an ornament tothe medical literature of the Arabs. It ranks highin importance, he continues, in the history of epi-demiology as the earliest monograph upon small-pox,and shows us Rhazes as a conscientious practitioner,almost free from dogmatic prejudices, following in thefootsteps of Hippocrates.Another monograph by Razi on stone in the bladderand kidneys has been published in the original, with aFrench translation (Leyden, 1896), by Dr P. de Koning,who has also published the text and translation of theanatomical portion of theKitdbu l-Hdwi, or ' ' Continens, togetherwith the corresponding portions of the Kitdbul-Maliki, or Liber Regius, of 'Ali ibnu'l-'Abbas andthe Qdntin of Avicenna. To Steinschneider we are in-debted for German translations of other tracts by Razi,notably his entertaining work on the success of char-latans and quacks in securing a popularity often deniedto the competent and properly qualified physician 2 .

1 Ernest Playfair's translation, vol. i, p. 362.2Virchow's Archiv, vol. xxxvi, pp. 570-586.


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48 Arabian. Medicine. IIOther unpublished monographs by Razi exist in variouspublic libraries in Europe and the East. Thus a MS.(Add. 3516) recently acquired by purchase by theCambridge University Library contains the treatises ongout and rheumatism 1 and on colic 2 mentioned byal-Qifti.Of general works on Medicine, apart from hisnumerous monographs, Razi composed some half dozen,to wit the Jdmi' or Compendium, the Kdft orSufficient, the Lesser and the Greater Madkhal or Introduction, the Multiki or Royal, compiled for'AH ibn Veh-Siidhan the ruler of Tabaristan, the Fdkhiror Splendid (of which, however, the authorship seemsto be uncertain), and last but not least the Manstirior Liber Almansoris, of which a Latin translationwas published in A.D. 1489, and the Hdwi or Con-tinens, of which a Latin translation was published inA.D. 1486 at Brescia, and again at Venice in A.D. 1542.This translation is very rare, and the only copy atCambridge is in the Library of King's College 3 . It isof the Hdwi or Continens only that I propose tospeak, since it is by far the largest and most importantof Razi's works.

Unfortunately the study of the Hdwi is fraught withpeculiar difficulties. Not only has it never been pub-lished in the original, but no complete manuscript exists,and, indeed, so far as my present knowledge goes, Idoubt if more than half of this immense work exists atall at the present day, while the extant volumes arewidely dispersed, three volumes in the British Museum,three in the Bodleian, four or five in the Escorial, othersat Munich and Petrograd and some abridgments in

1 Ff. 110-142. 2 Ff. 48-62.8 Its class-mark is xv. 4. 2.


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The Hawi or Continent 49Berlin. Moreover there is some uncertainty as to thenumber and contents of the volumes which the workcomprises, for while the FihrisP enumerates only 12,the Latin translation contains 25, nor is there any cor-respondence in subject-matter or arrangement. Thisconfusion arises partly, no doubt, from the fact thatthe Hdwi was a posthumous work, compiled after thedeath of Razi by his pupils from unfinished notes andpapers which he left behind him, and lacking the unityof plan and finishing touches which only the author'shand could give, and partly from the fact that the sametitle seems to have been sometimes applied to anotherof his larger works. Moreover the Hdwi, on accountof its enormous size and the mass of detail which itcontained, appalled the most industrious copyists, andwas beyond the reach of all save the most wealthybibliophiles, so that 'Ali ibnu'l-'Abbas, of whom

arabian medicine

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