The "Paradise of Wisdom"

39

Tabarí was reading it while he lay sick in bed; while in another passage of the same work¹, where that eminent patron of letters the Şâhib Isma'il ibn 'Abbâd is censured for imagining himself to be superior to all the greatest authorities in every science and art, the *Firdaws*, or "Paradise," of 'Alî ibn Rabban² is mentioned amongst those authorities. Subsequently this book, like so many other precious Arab works, became almost extinct, 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 have had photographed for my use; and another (**Landberg, 266**) at Berlin; but this latter copy seems, so far as I have been able to learn, to be only an abridgment, or at least to contain a somewhat mutilated or abbreviated text.

The "Paradise of Wisdom," which I hope some
day to edit and perhaps translate, deals chiefly with
Medicine, but also to some extent with Philosophy,
Meteorology, Zoology, Embryology, Psychology and
Astronomy. It is a fair-sized book containing nearly
550 pages, and is divided into 7 parts (*Naw'), 30 dis-
courses (*Maqála*), and 360 chapters. The author
mentions as his principal sources Hippocrates, Aristotle,
Galen, Yuhanná ibn Másawayh (Messues) and Hunayn
"the Interpreter," i.e. Hunayn ibn Isháq, the medieval
Johannitius. The fourth and last Discourse of the
seventh Part contains in 36 chapters a summary of
Indian Medicine. It would be tedious to you if I were
to read out the abstract of the contents of the book
which I have made, nor would the author himself have
approved 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 زين (Zayn) for رين (Rabban).

40

Arabian Medicine. II

resembles one who wanders in fruitful and pleasant gardens, or in the markets of great cities, wherein is provided for each of the senses its pleasure and delight. But just as he who limits his knowledge of such gardens and cities to the contemplation of their gates is as one who seeth naught of them, so he who enumerates the chapters of this my book without attentively reading what is contained in each, doth not understand the true meaning of what I say.... But he who masters this book, and fully fathoms and perpends it, will find in it the greater part of what the young graduate needs of the Science of Medicine and the action of the natural forces in this Microcosm and also in the Macrocosm."

Some justification is perhaps needed for rendering the Arabic word *mutakharrij* in the above passage in its modern sense of "graduate," which may seem too definite a translation of a word implying one who comes out, or issues forth, from a school or college at which he has completed his studies. It is therefore worth noting that some sort of qualifying examination in medicine, if it did not already exist in A.D. 850, when our author wrote, was instituted 80 years later in the reign of the Caliph al-Muqtadir on account of a case of malpraxis which came to his notice in A.D. 931. He thereupon issued an order, as al-Qifti informs us¹, that none should practise medicine in Baghdad unless he was able to satisfy Sinán ibn Thábit of Harrán of his competence and proficiency, with the exception of a few physicians of recognized standing, who, on account of their reputation, were exempted from this test, to which the remainder, numbering some 860, had to submit. That the examination was not always of a very searching character is shown by the following incident. Amongst

¹ *Ta’ríkhu’l-Ḥukamá*, pp. 191-2.

A lenient Oral Examination

4I

the practitioners who presented themselves before Sinán
was a dignified and well-dressed old man of imposing
appearance. Sinán accordingly treated him with con-
sideration and respect, and addressed to him various
remarks on the cases before him. When the other can-
didates had been dismissed, he said, "I should like to
hear from the Shaykh (Professor) something which I
may remember from him, and that he should mention
who was his Teacher in the Profession." Thereupon the
old gentleman laid a packet of money before Sinán and
said, "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 beg
you not to interrupt." Sinán laughed and replied, "On
condition that you do not treat any patient with what
you know nothing about, and that you do not prescribe
phlebotomy or any purgative drug save for simple
ailments." "This," said the old man, "has been my
practice all my life, nor have I ever ventured beyond
sirkangabín (oxymel) and julláb (jalap)." Next day
amongst those who presented themselves before Sinán
was a well-dressed young man of pleasing and intelligent
appearance. "With whom did you study?" enquired
Sinán. "With my father," answered the youth. "And
who is your father?" asked Sinán. "The old gentleman
who was with you yesterday," replied the other. "A
fine old gentleman!" exclaimed Sinán; "and do you
follow his methods?...Yes?...Then see to it that you
do not go beyond them!"

Although, as I have said, a detailed statement of the
contents of the "Paradise of Wisdom" would be out
of place, the general plan of the book may be briefly
indicated.

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Arabian Medicine. II

PART I. Treats of certain general philosophical ideas, the categories, natures, elements, metamorphosis, genesis and decay.

PART II. Treats of embryology, pregnancy, the functions and morphology of different organs, ages and seasons, psychology, the external and internal senses, the temperaments and emotions, personal idiosyncrasies, 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 12 Discourses) treats of general and special pathology, from the head to the feet, and concludes with an account of the number of muscles, nerves and veins, and dissertations 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 in their relation to health, outlines of cosmography and astronomy, and the utility of the science of medicine: and concludes, as already noted, with a summary of Indian Medicine in 36 chapters.

It will be noticed that the book contains very little about anatomy or surgery and a great deal about climate, diet and drugs, including poisons. Part IV, dealing with pathology, is on the whole the most interesting, and I may, perhaps, be permitted to enumerate more fully the contents of the 12 Discourses which it comprises:

*Discourse 1* (9 chapters) on general pathology, the signs and symptoms of internal disorders, and the principles of therapeutics.

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

Contents of the "Paradise of Wisdom"

43

*Discourse* 3 (12 chapters) on diseases of the eyes and eyelids, the ear and the nose (including epistaxis and catarrh), the face, mouth and teeth.

*Discourse* 4 (7 chapters) on nervous diseases, including spasm, tetanus, paralysis, facial palsy, etc.

*Discourse* 5 (7 chapters) on diseases of the throat, chest and vocal organs, including asthma.

*Discourse* 6 (6 chapters) on diseases of the stomach, including hiccough.

*Discourse* 7 (5 chapters) on diseases of the liver, including dropsy.

*Discourse* 8 (14 chapters) on diseases of the heart, lungs, gall-bladder and spleen.

*Discourse* 9 (19 chapters) on diseases of the intestines (especially colic), and of the urinary and genital organs.

*Discourse* 10 (26 chapters) on fevers, ephemeral, hectic, continuous, tertian, quartan and semi-quartan; on pleurisy, erysipelas, and small-pox; on crises, prognosis, favourable and unfavourable symptoms, and the signs of death.

*Discourse* 11 (13 chapters) on rheumatism, gout, sciatica, leprosy, elephantiasis, scrofula, lupus, cancer, tumours, gangrene, wounds and bruises, shock, and plague. The last four chapters deal with anatomical matters, including the numbers of the muscles, nerves and blood-vessels.

*Discourse* 12 (20 chapters) on phlebotomy, cupping, baths and the indications afforded by the pulse and urine.

This Fourth Part constitutes nearly two-fifths of the whole book, occupying 107 out of 276 folios and comprising in all 152 chapters. Each chapter is therefore very short, often less than one page and seldom more than two. There is little attempt to go beyond the

44

Arabian Medicine. II

chief signs and symptoms of each disease and the treat-
ment recommended, and, so far as I have seen, there
are no references to actual cases, or clinical notes. The
book, indeed, except for the First Part—which deals
with general philosophic conceptions, and contains some
interesting ideas regarding the genesis of the Four
Elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water) from the Four
Natures (Heat, Cold, Dryness and Moisture) and their
metamorphosis (استحالة)—is little more than a Prac-
titioner's Vade-mecum, chiefly interesting as one of the
earliest extant independent medical works in Arabic
written by the teacher of the great physician whom we
have now to consider.

Abú Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyá of Ray, hence
called in Arabic ar-Rází, and by the medieval Latinists
“Rhazes,” was probably the greatest and most original
of all the Muslim physicians, and one of the most prolific
as an author. His birth-place, Ray, situated a few miles
from Tïhrán, the modern capital of Persia, was one of
the most ancient Persian cities, being mentioned in the
*Avesta*¹ as “Ragha of the three races,” the twelfth of
the good lands created by Ahura Mazda. In early life
music was his chief interest, and he was a skilful player
on the lute. He then devoted himself to Philosophy,
but, according to the Qádí Sá‘id², “did not fathom
Metaphysics, nor apprehend its ultimate aim, so that
his judgment was troubled and he adopted indefensible
views, espoused objectionable [i.e. heterodox] doctrines,
and criticized people whom he did not understand, and
whose methods he did not follow.” Herein he stands
in sharp contrast with Avicenna, of whom we shall speak

¹ *Vendîdâd*, Fargard ii, v. 16.

⁹ Ibn Abí Uṣaybiʿa, i, p. 310.

Ar-Rāzī (“Rhazes”)

45

presently; for Avicenna was a better philosopher than physician, but Rāzī a better physician than philosopher.

Rāzī, as Ibn Abī Uşaybiʻa informs us, spent most of his life in Persia, because it was his native country, and because his brother and his kinsmen dwelt there. His interest in Medicine was aroused, when he was of mature age, by visits to the hospital and conversations with an old druggist or dispenser who served in it. Of the hospital at Ray he ultimately became chief physician, and there he attended regularly, surrounded by his pupils and the pupils of his pupils. Every patient who presented himself was first examined by the latter—the clinical clerks, as we should say; and if the case proved too difficult for them it was passed on to the Master's immediate pupils, and finally, if necessary, to himself. Subsequently Rāzī became physician-in-chief to the great hospital at Baghdad, about the foundation of which he is said to have been consulted. Being asked to select the most suitable site, he is said to have caused pieces of meat to be hung up in different quarters of the city, and to have chosen the place where they were slowest in showing signs of decomposition. While in Persia he enjoyed the friendship and patronage of Manşūr ibn Ishāq, the ruler of Khurāsān, for whom he composed his *Kitābu'l-Manşūrī* (the “Liber Al-mansoris”). The chronology of his life is very uncertain, for not only do the dates assigned to his death vary between A.D. 903 and 923¹ but he has even been associated by some writers² with the great Buwayhid

¹ Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, i, p. 314.

² *Ibid.*, pp. 309-310, but the author expresses the correct opinion that Rāzī was antecedent to ‘Aḍudu’d-Dawla, and that the hospital with which he was connected only received the name of ‘Aḍudī at a later date.

46

Arabian Medicine. II

ruler 'Aḍudu'd-Dawla, who reigned from A.D. 949-982, and who founded the Bímáristánu'l-'Aḍudí, or 'Aḍudí Hospital, the site of which Rází is said to have selected as described above, at the end of his reign.

One detail occurring in all the accounts of Rází is that he became blind towards the end of his life from a cataract, and that he refused to undergo an operation on the ground that he desired to see no more of a world with which he was disgusted and disillusioned. The indirect cause of his blindness is further stated to have been his preoccupation with Alchemy, on which, as we know from the list of his writings given by al-Qifṭí and Ibn Abí Uṣaybi'a, he composed twelve treatises. One of them he dedicated and presented to a certain great man, who gave him a large reward, and then bade him apply his science to the actual production of gold. Rází made various excuses for declining this test, whereupon the great man lost his temper, accused him of fraud and charlatanism, and struck him a blow on the head which caused him to go blind. Other writers assert that he was secretly strangled for his failure, while others ascribe his blindness to the excessive eating of beans, of which he was very fond. In short his biographers have sought to compensate us for the meagre and conflicting details of his career which they offer us by just such extraordinary stories as gathered round the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages in Europe, where every student of science who transcended his age was suspected of being a magician.

When we turn to the writings of Rází, however, we are on surer ground, for there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the list of those given by the three most trustworthy biographers, and said to be based on the author's own notes and statements. The Fihrist, our

Writings of Ar-Rāzī

47

oldest authority, enumerates 113 major and 28 minor
works by him, besides two poems. Most of these are
lost, but what remain are amply sufficient to enable us
to appraise his learning, though even of these but few
are accessible save in manuscript. Of his many mono-
graphs the most celebrated in Europe is his well-known
treatise on small-pox and measles, first published in the
original Arabic with a Latin translation by Channing
(London, 1766). Of this a Latin translation had already
appeared in Venice in 1565, and an English version
by Greenhill was published by the Sydenham Society
in 1848. This tract was formerly known as de Peste or
de Pestilentiâ, and, as Neuburger says¹, “on every
hand and with justice it is regarded as an ornament to
the medical literature of the Arabs.” “It ranks high
in 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 the
footsteps of Hippocrates.”

Another monograph by Rāzī on stone in the bladder
and kidneys has been published in the original, with a
French translation (Leyden, 1896), by Dr P. de Koning,
who has also published the text and translation of the
anatomical portion of the *Kitābu'l-Ḥāwī, or "Continens,"*
together with the corresponding portions of the *Kitābu'l-
*Malikī, or “Liber Regius,” of ‘Alī ibnū'l-‘Abbās and
the *Qānūn* of Avicenna. To Steinschneider we are in-
debted for German translations of other tracts by Rāzī,
notably his entertaining work on the success of char-
latans and quacks in securing a popularity often denied
to the competent and properly qualified physician².

¹ Ernest Playfair's translation, vol. i, p. 362.

² Virchow's *Archiv*, vol. xxxvi, pp. 570-586.

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Arabian Medicine. II

Other unpublished monographs by Rází exist in various public libraries in Europe and the East. Thus a MS. (Add. 3516) recently acquired by purchase by the Cambridge University Library contains the treatises on gout and rheumatism¹ and on colic² mentioned by al-Qiftí.

Of general works on Medicine, apart from his numerous monographs, Rází composed some half dozen, to wit the *Jámi'* or “Compendium,” the *Káfí* or “Sufficient,” the Lesser and the Greater *Madkhal* or “Introduction,” the *Mulúkí* or “Royal,” compiled for ‘Ali ibn Veh-Súdhán the ruler of Ṭabaristán, the *Fakhír* or “Splendid” (of which, however, the authorship seems to be uncertain), and last but not least the *Mansúrí* or “Liber Almansoris,” of which a Latin translation was published in A.D. 1489, and the *Háwí* or “Continens,” of which a Latin translation was published in A.D. 1486 at Brescia, and again at Venice in A.D. 1542. This translation is very rare, and the only copy at Cambridge is in the Library of King’s College³. It is of the *Háwí* or “Continens” only that I propose to speak, since it is by far the largest and most important of Rází’s works.

Unfortunately the study of the *Háwí* is fraught with peculiar difficulties. Not only has it never been published in the original, but no complete manuscript exists, and, indeed, so far as my present knowledge goes, I doubt if more than half of this immense work exists at all at the present day, while the extant volumes are widely dispersed, three volumes in the British Museum, three in the Bodleian, four or five in the Escorial, others at Munich and Petrograd and some abridgments in

¹ Ff. 110-142.

³ Its class-mark is xv. 4. 2.

² Ff. 48-62.

The Háwí or “Continens”

49

Berlin. Moreover there is some uncertainty as to the number and contents of the volumes which the work comprises, for while the *Fihrist*¹ enumerates only 12, the Latin translation contains 25, nor is there any correspondence in subject-matter or arrangement. This confusion arises partly, no doubt, from the fact that the *Háwí* was a posthumous work, compiled after the death of Rází by his pupils from unfinished notes and papers which he left behind him, and lacking the unity of plan and finishing touches which only the author's hand could give, and partly from the fact that the same title seems to have been sometimes applied to another of his larger works. Moreover the *Háwí*, on account of its enormous size and the mass of detail which it contained, appalled the most industrious copyists, and was beyond the reach of all save the most wealthy bibliophiles, so that 'Alí ibnu'l-'Abbás, of whom I shall next speak, and who wrote only 50 or 60 years after Rází's death, tells us that in his day he only knew of two complete copies². From what original the Latin translation was made, and whether or where that original now exists, we are unfortunately ignorant, since the medieval translators did not condescend to mention such details. In face of these difficulties all that I have been able to do is to examine superficially the half dozen volumes in the British Museum and the Bodleian Libraries. Of these the most interesting is **Marsh 156** of the latter library, and in particular ff. 239 b-245 b, of which, through the kindness of Dr Cowley and Professor Margoliouth, I have obtained photographs.

I have already said, and indeed it has been generally

¹ p. 300.

² Kámiluʻs-Ṣináʻat (=al-Kitābuʻl-Malikí), Cairo edition of 1294/1877, vol. i, pp. 5-6.

B. A. M.

4

50

Arabian Medicine. II

recognized by all authorities on this subject, that it is
as a clinical observer that Rází excels all his compeers;
and since the clinical notes of these old "Arabian"
physicians are of much greater interest and importance
than their obsolete physiology and pathology or their
second-hand anatomy, a careful study of the works of
Rází, especially of his great Háwí or "Continens," is
probably the most repaying field to which the Arabic
scholar interested in Medicine can devote himself.
Some of his more celebrated and sensational cases are
recorded in such collections of anecdotes as the Arabic
*Kitábu'l-Faraj ba'da' sh-Shidda* ("Book of Relief after
Distress") of at-Tanúkhí (d. A.D. 994), and the Persian
*Chahár Maqála* ("Four Discourses"), compiled by
Nizámí-i-‘Arúdí of Samarqand about A.D. 1155. Ibn
Abí Uşaybi’a says in his *Classes of Physicians*¹, "There
are many accounts and various valuable observa-
tions by ar-Rází as to what he achieved by his skill
in the Art of Medicine, his unique attainments in the
healing of the sick, his deduction of their condition
through his skill in prognosis, and the information which
he gave as to their symptoms and treatment, unto the
like of which but few physicians have attained. He has
many narratives of what fell within his experience in
these and like matters, which are contained in many of
his works."

Now the dozen pages in the Bodleian MS. referred
to above (supposed to be the seventh volume of the
Ḥáwí, but agreeing better with the seventeenth of the
Latin translation²), contain precisely such clinical notes
as are mentioned by Ibn Abí Uṣaybi'a. They are

¹ Vol. i, p. 311.

² Book vii of the Latin translation is entitled *De passionibus cordis et epatis et splenis*; Book xvii *De effimerâ et ethicâ* (? hecticâ).

52

Arabian Medicine. II

دلّتي على ذلك انه لم يشك الى ابتداءً ثقلًا فى قَطْنِهِ لكن بعد أن
بال مِدَّةٍ قَلْتُ له هل كنْتَ تجد ذلك قال نعم فلو كان كثيراً لقد
كان يشكو ذلك وان المِدَّةُ تُنْبَثُ سريعاً تدلّ على صغر الخراج فأمَّا
غيرى من الاطباء فأنَّهم كانوا بعد أن بال مِدَّةٍ ايضاً لا يعلمون حالتهم
البَتَّةِ

“‘Abdu’lláh ibn Sawáda used to suffer from attacks of mixed fever, sometimes quotidian, sometimes tertian, sometimes quartan, and sometimes recurring once in six days. These attacks were preceded by a slight rigor, and micturition was very frequent. I gave it as my opinion that either these accesses of fever would turn into quartan, or that there was ulceration of the kidneys. Only a short while elapsed ere the patient passed pus in his urine. I thereupon informed him that these feverish attacks would not recur, and so it was.

“The only thing which prevented me at first from giving it as my definite opinion that the patient was suffering from ulceration of the kidneys was that he had previously suffered from tertian and other mixed types of fever, and this to some extent confirmed my suspicion that this mixed fever might be from inflammatory processes which would tend to become quartan when they waxed stronger.

“Moreover the patient did not complain to me that his loins felt like a weight depending from him when he stood up; and I neglected to ask him about this. The frequent micturition also should have strengthened my suspicion of ulceration of the kidneys, but I did not know that his father suffered from weakness of the bladder and was subject to this complaint, and it used likewise to come upon him when he was healthy¹, and it ought not to be the case henceforth, till the end of his life, if God will.

“So when he passed the pus I administered to him diuretics until the urine became free from pus, after which I treated him with *terra sigillata*, Boswellia thurifera, and Dragon’s Blood, and his sickness departed from him, and he was quickly and completely cured in about two months. That the ulceration was slight was indicated to me by the fact that he did not complain to me at first of weight in the loins. After he had passed pus, however, I enquired of him whether he had experienced this symptom, and he replied in the affirmative. Had the

¹ *I.e.* before he suffered from fever.

‘Alí ibnu’l-‘Abbás (“Haly Abbas”)

53

ulceration been extensive, he would of his own accord have complained
of this symptom. And that the pus was evacuated quickly indicated
a limited ulceration. The other physicians whom he consulted besides
myself, however, did not understand the case at all, even after the
patient had passed pus in his urine."

In spite of several difficulties, both verbal and
material, which I have not yet been able to solve to my
satisfaction, the general nature of this case seems fairly
clear. The patient suffered from intermittent and ir-
regular attacks of fever preceded by slight rigors, which,
in a land infested with ague, were diagnosed and treated
as malarial, though really septic in origin. Rází himself
at first took this view, but subsequently, observing the
presence of pus in the urine, diagnosed the case as one
of pyelitis, and treated it accordingly with success.

We now come to the third name in our list, ‘Alí
ibnu’l-‘Abbás, known in Europe in the Middle Ages as
“Haly Abbas,” of whose *Kitábu’l-Malikí*, or “Liber
Regius,” the Latin translation by “Stephen the Philo-
sopher,” with annotations by Michael de Capella, was
printed at Lyons in 1523. The notice of him given by
al-Qiftí¹ is so short that it may be translated in full :

“Alí ibnu’l-‘Abbás al-Majúsí (the Magian or
Zoroastrian), an accomplished and perfect physician of
Persian origin, known as ‘the son of the Magian.’ He
studied with a Persian professor (*Shaykh*) known as
Abú Máhir [Músá ibn Sayyár], and also studied and
worked by himself, and acquainted himself with the
writings of the ancients. He composed for the King
‘Aḍudu’d-Dawla Fanákhusraw the Buwayhid² his Sys-
tem of Medicine entitled *al-Malikí* (“the Royal”), which
is a splendid work and a noble thesaurus comprehending
the science and practice of Medicine, admirably arranged.

¹ p. 232.

² Reigned 949-982.

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Arabian Medicine. II

It enjoyed great popularity in its day and was diligently studied, until the appearance of Avicenna's *Qánún*, which usurped its popularity and caused the *Malikí* to be somewhat neglected. The latter excels on the practical and the former on the scientific side."

The *Fihrist* no longer serves us, as it was completed at a date antecedent to that of which we are now speaking, and the only important particular added by Ibn Abí Uşaybi‘a¹ is that ‘Alí ibnu’l-‘Abbás was a native of Ahwáz in S.W. Persia, not far from the once great medical school of Jundí-Shápúr of which so much was said in the last lecture; while his *nisba* or title of al-Majúsí indicates that his father or grandfather originally belonged to the old Persian religion of Zoroaster. Neither he nor his master Abú Máhir wrote much; the *Malikí* is the only work ascribed to him by the bio- graphers, though Brockelmann² mentions a MS. at Gotha containing another medical treatise attributed to him, while only two works by his master are mentioned, a treatise on phlebotomy, and a supplement to one of Isḥáq ibn Hunayn’s smaller manuals on practical Medicine.

Although we know no more of the life of ‘Alí ibnu ’l-‘Abbás than the meagre details just mentioned, and of his date only that he was contemporary with the great and enlightened ‘Aḍudu’d-Dawla, the founder of the ‘Aḍudí Hospital at Baghdad, who flourished in the latter half of the tenth century, his work, the *Malikí* or “Liber Regius,” is the most accessible and most readable of the great Arabic Systems of Medicine, since an excellent edition in two volumes was printed at Cairo in 1294/1877, and the Latin version, though rare, is

¹ Vol. i, pp. 236-7.

² *Gesch. d. Arab. Litt.*, vol. i, p. 237.

Al-Kitābu'l-Malikī ("Liber Regius")

55

fortunately not included amongst the *Incunabula*, and
can therefore be borrowed from the libraries which
possess it. The Arabic text comprises some 400,000
words, and is divided into 20 Discourses, each sub-
divided into numerous chapters, of which the first ten
deal with the theory, and the second ten with the
practice of Medicine. The second and third of these
Discourses, dealing with Anatomy, have been published
with a French translation by Dr P. de Koning (Leyden,
1903) in his *Trois Traités d'Anatomie Arabes* (pp.
90-431). The nineteenth Discourse, containing 110
chapters, is devoted entirely to Surgery¹.

The introductory portion of the book, comprising
the first three chapters of the first Discourse, is very
well written and very interesting, especially the criticism
of previous works on Medicine. Of the Greek physicians
he discusses especially Hippocrates, Galen, Oribasius
and Paul of Ægina; of the Syrians and Muslims,
Ahrún the Priest, Yuhanná ibn Serapion, and ar-Rází.
He finds Hippocrates too concise and hence sometimes
obscure, and Galen too diffuse; he criticizes Oribasius
and Paul of Ægina for omitting or dealing inadequately
with Anatomy, Surgery, Natural Philosophy, Humoral
Pathology, and the Ætiology of disease. Of the
moderns he finds the work of Ahrún alone adequate in
its scope, but complains of the badness and obscurity
of the Arabic translation. Ibn Serapion, he says, ignores
Surgery, omits all mention of many important diseases
which he enumerates, including Aneurism, and arranges
his materials badly and unsystematically. I have already
alluded to his observations on the enormous size and
prolixity of Rází's "Continens," which placed it beyond
the reach of all save the very wealthy, and so led to an

¹ pp. 454-516 of vol. ii of the Cairo edition.

56

Arabian Medicine. II

extreme scarcity of manuscripts, even within a short
time of the author's death, while Rázi's other and better-
known work the *Mansúrí* he finds unduly concise. He
then explains the plan of his own book, in which he
seeks to find a *via media* between undue conciseness
and prolixity, and illustrates his method by a specimen
description of pleurisy. He begins with the definition
of the disease and its aetiology; then proceeds to the
four constant symptoms, fever, cough, pain and dyspnoea;
whence he passes to the prognosis, and especially the
indications furnished by the sputa, and concludes with
the treatment. His remarks at the end of this chapter
on the importance of regular attendance at the hospitals
are worth quoting¹.

"And of those things which are incumbent on the student of this Art are that he should constantly attend the hospitals and sick-houses; pay unremitting attention to the conditions and circumstances of their inmates, in company with the most acute professors of Medicine; and enquire frequently as to the state of the patients and the symptoms apparent in them, bearing in mind what he has read about these variations, and what they indicate of good or evil. If he does this, he will reach a high degree in this Art. Therefore it behoves him who desires to be an accomplished physician to follow closely these injunctions, to form his character in accordance with what we have mentioned therein, and not to neglect them. If he does this, his treatment of the sick will be successful; people will have confidence in him and be favourably disposed towards him, and he will win their affection and respect and a good reputa-

¹ Vol. i, p. 9. The corresponding passage in the Latin translation occurs in the upper part of the left-hand column of f. 7b of the Lyons edition of A.D. 1523.

Fees received by leading Physicians

57

tion; nor withal will he lack profit and advantage from them. And God Most High knoweth best."

In connection with the concluding words of the above extract, something may be said here as to the fees earned by one of the most eminent physicians under the early 'Abbásid Caliphs, viz. Jibrá'il ibn Bukht-Yishú', who died about A.D. 830. According to al-Qiftí's he received out of the public funds a monthly salary of 10,000 dirhams, and from the Privy Purse 50,000 dirhams at the beginning of each year, besides clothes to the value of 10,000 dirhams. For bleeding the Caliph Hárúnu'r-Rashid twice a year he was paid 100,000 dirhams, and an equal sum for administering a biennial purgative draught. From the nobles of the Court he received in cash and kind 400,000 dirhams a year, and from the great Barmecide family 1,400,000 dirhams. According to al-Qiftí's computation, the total amount which he received in these ways, apart from what he earned privately from lesser patients, during his 23 years' service of Hárúnu'r-Rashid and his 13 years' service of the Barmecides, amounted to 88,800,000 dirhams, a sum equivalent, if we accept von Kremer's² estimate of the dirham as roughly equivalent to a franc, to more than three and a half million pounds sterling.

I come now to the last and most famous of the four Persian physicians of whom I propose to speak to-day, viz. Avicenna, or, to give him his correct name, Abú 'Alí Husayn ibn 'Abdu'lláh ibn Síná, generally entitled ash-Shaykhu'r-Ra'ís, the "Chief Master," or al-Mu 'allimu'th-Thání, the "Second Teacher," to wit after Aristotle. The difficulty here is to decide what to say

¹ pp. 142-3.

² *Culturgeschichte d. Orients, vol. i, p. 15 ad calc.*

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Arabian Medicine. II

out of so much that deserves mention, for in Avicenna,
philosopher, physician, poet and man of affairs, the so-
called Arabian science culminates, and is, as it were,
personified. In the limits prescribed to me it would be
impossible to enumerate his multitudinous writings on
philosophy and science, or to narrate the details of a
life of which he himself kept a record, still preserved
to us, up to his twenty-first year, and of which the
remainder has been recorded by his pupil and friend
Abú 'Ubayd of Júzján. His father, an adherent of the
Isma'ilí sect, was from Balkh and his mother from a
village near Bukhárá, and he was born about A.D. 980.
At the age of ten he was already proficient in the
Qur'án and the Arabic classics. During the six succeed-
ing years he devoted himself to Muslim Jurisprudence,
Philosophy and Natural Science, and studied Logic,
Euclid, the 'Εισαγωγή, and the Almagest. He turned
his attention to Medicine at the age of sixteen, and
found it "not difficult," but was greatly troubled by
metaphysical problems, until, by a fortunate chance, he
obtained possession of a small and cheap manual by
the celebrated philosopher al-Fárábí, which solved his
difficulties. When he was not much more than eighteen
years old his reputation as a physician was such that he
was summoned to attend the Sámání ruler Núḥ ibn
Manṣúr (reigned A.D. 976-997), who, in gratitude for
his services, allowed him to make free use of the royal
library, which contained many rare and even unique
books. This library was subsequently destroyed by fire,
and Avicenna's detractors did not scruple to assert that
he himself had purposely burned it so as to enjoy a
monopoly of the learning he had derived from it. At
the age of twenty-one he lost his father, and about the
same time composed his first book. He entered the

Avicenna's Life and Adventures

59

service of 'Alí ibn Ma'mún, the ruler of Khwárazm or Khiva, for a while, but ultimately fled thence to avoid the attempt of Sulṭán Mahmúd of Ghazna to kidnap him. After many wanderings he came to Jurján, attracted by the fame of its ruler Qábús as a patron of learning, but the deposition and murder of that prince almost coincided with his arrival, and he bitterly ex-claimed in a poem which he composed on this occasion:

لِمَا عظْمَتْ فليس مصر واسعٌ لِمَا غلا ثمنى عدْمَتِ المشْتَرِي

“When I became great no country had room for me;
When my price went up I lacked a purchaser.”

Such a “purchaser,” however, he ultimately found in the Amír Shamsu'd-Dawla of Hamadán, whom he cured of the colic, and who made him his Prime Minister. A mutiny of the soldiers against him caused his dismissal and imprisonment, but subsequently the Amír, being again attacked by the colic, summoned him back, apologized to him, and reinstated him. His life at this time was extraordinarily strenuous; all day he was busy with the Amír's service, while a great part of the night was passed in lecturing and dictating notes for his books, with intervals of wine-drinking and minstrelsy. After many vicissitudes, which time forbids me to enumerate, but which are minutely chronicled by his faithful friend and disciple Abú 'Ubayd of Júzján, Avicenna, worn out by hard work and hard living, died in 428/1036-7 at the comparatively early age of 58. In his last illness he treated himself unsuccessfully, so that it was said by his detractors that neither could his physic save his body nor his metaphysics his soul¹.

¹ The verses in question are given by Ibn Abí Uşaybi'a (Ṭaba- qátu'l-Aṭibbá, vol. ii, p. 6), and in the notes to my forthcoming trans- lation of the Chahár Maqála ("E. J. W. Gibb Memorial" Series, vol. xi, 2, p. 156).

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Arabian Medicine. II

His writings were numerous and in many cases
voluminous, some of his major works comprising as
many as twenty volumes. The professedly complete list
of them given by al-Qiftī¹ includes the titles of 21 major
and 24 minor works on philosophy, medicine, theology,
geometry, astronomy, philology and the like. Most of
these are in Arabic; but in Persian, his native language,
he wrote one large book, a manual of philosophical
sciences entitled *Dānish-náma-i-ʻAláí* (represented by
a MS. in the British Museum²), and a small treatise on
the Pulse. The list given by Brockelmann in his *Ge-
schichte der Arabischen Litteratur* (vol. i, pp. 452–458),
which includes only extant works, is, however, much
more extensive than al-Qiftī’s, and comprises 68 books
on theology and metaphysics, 11 on astronomy and
natural philosophy, 16 on medicine, and 4 in verse,
99 books in all. His most celebrated Arabic poem is
that describing the descent of the Soul into the Body
from the Higher Sphere (المحَلُّ الأَرْفَع) which is its home,
a poem of real beauty, of which a translation is given
in my *Literary History of Persia* (vol. ii, pp. 110–111).
The industry of the late Dr Ethé has also collected
from various biographical works 15 short Persian poems,
mostly quatrains, comprising in all some forty verses,
which are ascribed to Avicenna. Of these the best
known is commonly, but probably falsely, ascribed to
‘Umar Khayyám, at least one fifth of whose reputed
quatrains are attributed on as good or better evidence
to other people. The quatrain in question is the one
translated by FitzGerald:

¹ Ed. Lippert, p. 418.

² Or. 16, 830. See Rieu's *Pers. Cat.*, pp. 433-4. Mr A. G. Ellis has called my attention to a lithographed edition of this work, published in India in 1309/1891.

Avicenna's Poems

61

"Up from Earth's Centre through the Seventh Gate
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many a knot unravelled by the Road,
But not the Master-knot of Human Fate."

The original, as given in the *Majmaʻuʻl-Fuṣaḥá*,¹ runs
as follows:

> از قعدِ كِل سیاه تا اوچ زحل،
> كردم همه مشکلات گیتی را حلّ،
> بيرون جَسْتُمْ زقید هرمکرو حیل،
> هر بند گشاده شد مگر بند اجل

Of Avicenna's medical works exactly half, viz. 8, are
versified treatises on such matters as the 25 signs indi-
cating the fatal termination of illnesses, hygienic pre-
cepts, proved remedies, anatomical memoranda, and the
like. One or two of them have been published in the
East, but I have not seen them. I imagine, however,
that they are of little value either as verse or as science.
Of his prose works, after the great Qánún, the treatise
on Cardiac Drugs (الأسوية القلبية), of which the British
Museum possesses several fine old manuscripts, is
probably the most important, but it remains unpublished,
and is inaccessible beyond the walls of that and a few
other great public libraries².

The *Qánún* is, of course, by far the largest, the
most famous, and the most important of Avicenna's
medical works, and at the same time the most accessible,
both in the original Arabic and in the Latin translation
of Gerard of Cremona. There is a modern Egyptian
edition of the Arabic text, besides the Roman edition of
A.D. 1593; and a fine Venetian translation into Latin
published in 1544. The work contains not much less
than a million words, and, like most Arabic books, is

¹ Vol. i, p. 68.

² Berlin, Gotha, Leyden, and the Escorial.

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Arabian Medicine. II

elaborately divided and subdivided. The main division
is into five Books, of which the first treats of general
principles; the second of simple drugs arranged alpha-
betically; the third of diseases of particular organs and
members of the body, from the head to the feet; the
fourth of diseases which, though local and partial in
their inception, tend to spread to other parts of the body,
such as fevers; and the fifth of compound medicines.
These descriptions are in fact very inadequate. Thus
Book IV treats not only of fevers, but of critical days,
prognosis, tumours and ulcers, fractures, dislocations
and toxicology.

I had intended to discuss this great and celebrated
book more fully than the time at my disposal to-day
actually allows, but this is of the less consequence inasm-
much as the College has done me the honour of inviting
me to deliver the FitzPatrick lectures again next year,
when I hope to recur to it in connection with the topics
of which I shall then have to treat. Its encyclopaedic
character, its systematic arrangement, its philosophic
plan, perhaps even its dogmatism, combined with the
immense reputation of its author in other fields besides
Medicine, raised it to a unique position in the medical
literature of the Muslim world, so that the earlier works of
ar-Rāzī and al-Majūsī, in spite of their undoubted merits,
were practically abrogated by it, and it is still regarded
in the East by the followers of the old Greek Medicine,
the *Tibb-i-Yūnānī*, as the last appeal on all matters
connected with the healing art. In proof of this statement,
and to show the extraordinary reverence in which
Avicenna is held, I will conclude with a quotation from
that pleasant work the *Chahār Maqāla*, or “Four Discourses,”
composed in Persian in the middle of the
twelfth century of our era, and dealing with four classes

The Qánún of Avicenna

63

of men, to wit Secretaries of State, Poets, Astrologers and Physicians, deemed by the author, Niẓámí-i-‘Arúḍí of Samarqand, indispensable for the service of kings. After enumerating a number of books which should be diligently studied by him who aspires to eminence in Medicine, the author says that if he desires to be independent of all other works he may rest satisfied with the *Qánún*, and thus continues¹:

“The Lord of the two Worlds and Guide of the two Material Races saith: ‘*Every kind of game is comprehended in the Wild Ass.*’ All this, together with much more, is to be found in the *Qánún*, and from him who hath mastered the first volume thereof nothing will be hidden concerning the general theory and principles of Medicine, so that could Hippocrates and Galen return to life, it would be proper that they should do reverence to this book. Yet have I heard a wonderful thing, to wit that one hath taken exception to Abú ‘Alí [Avicenna] in respect to this work, and hath embodied his criticisms in a book which he hath entitled the *Rectification of the Qánún*. It is as though I looked upon both, and saw how foolish is the author and how detestable his work. For what right hath anyone to find fault with so great a man, when the very first question he meets with in a book of his which he comes across is difficult to his comprehension? For four thousand years the physicians of antiquity travailed in spirit and spent their very souls in order to reduce the science of

¹ The passage cited occurs on pp. 70-71 of the text of the *Chahár Maqála* published in 1910 in the “E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series, vol. xi, and on pp. 110-111 of the separate reprint of the translation which I published in 1899 in the *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society*. In my new revised translation, which will appear shortly as vol. xi, 2 of the Gibb Series, it will be found on pp. 79-80.

64

Arabian Medicine. II

Philosophy to some fixed order, yet could they not effect
this; until after the lapse of this period that pure philo-
sopher and most great thinker Aristotle weighed out this
coin in the balance of Logic, assayed it with the touch-
stone of Definitions, and measured it with the measure
of Analogy, so that all doubt and uncertainty departed
from it, and it was established on a sure and critical
basis. And during these fifteen centuries which have
elapsed since his time, no philosopher has won to the
inmost essence of his doctrine, nor travelled the high
road of his pre-eminence save that most excellent of
the moderns, the Philosopher of the East, the Proof
of God to mankind, Abú 'Alí Husayn ibn 'Abdu'lláh
ibn Síná [Avicenna]. Whosoever, therefore, finds fault
with these two great men will have cast himself out
from the fellowship of the wise, ranked himself with
madmen, and revealed himself as fit company only for
fools. May God by His Grace and Favour keep us
from such stumblings and vain imaginings!”

LECTURE III

BEFORE proceeding further with my subject, it may, perhaps, be well that I should recapitulate very briefly the main points I endeavoured to establish in the two lectures which I had the honour of delivering before you last year. I pointed out that the term "Arabian Medicine" (to which "Islamic Medicine" would be preferable) can be justified only if weregard the language which serves as its vehicle, and the auspices under which it was evolved; that it was an eclectic synthesis of more ancient systems, chiefly Greek, but in a lesser degree Indian and old Persian, with a tincture of other exotic systems less easily to be identified; and that the Medicine of the Arabian people at the time of their Prophet's advent, that is in the early seventh century of the Christian era, was, as it continues to be, of the most primitive type. In this connection I referred to the observations of Dr Zwemer in his *Arabia, the Cradle of Islám*, and I must now add a reference to a very interesting little book in Arabic by an Egyptian doctor, 'Abdu'r-Rahmán Efendi Isma'il, published at Cairo in 1892 or 1893, on the popular medicine and medical superstitions of his countrymen, and, still more, of his countrywomen. This system, if such it can be called, is entitled *Tibbu'r-Rukka*¹, roughly equivalent in meaning to "Old Wives' Medicine," and is fiercely exposed and denounced by the author, who regards its survival until

¹ On the word *Rukka*, which is apparently borrowed from the Italian *rocco*, see an interesting observation by Vollers in vol. xxi of the Z. D. M. G. (1897), p. 322.

B. A. M.

5

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Arabian Medicine. III

the present day in a country like Egypt, supposed to be
in touch with modern enlightenment, as an abomination.

In the development of Arabian Medicine in the
wider sense, that is to say, the adaptation of ancient
Greek Medicine to the general system of civilization
and science eclectically built up by Muslim scholars and
thinkers during the "Golden Prime" of the Caliphate
of Baghdad, namely from the middle of the eighth century
of our era onwards, I distinguished two periods, that
of the translation into Arabic of the masterpieces of
Greek medical literature, destined to form the basis of
further study; and that of the Arabic-speaking or at
any rate Arabic-writing physicians (many of whom
were Jews, Christians, Sabaeans and even Zoroastrians),
who, checking or modifying this material in the light of
their own experience, produced more or less independent
works. Of these I briefly discussed four of the most
notable who flourished in Persia between A.D. 850 and
A.D. 1036, the year in which died Abú 'Alí ibn Síná,
familiar to the West as Avicenna, the three others being
'Alí ibn Rabban, who composed his "Paradise of Wis-
dom" for the Caliph al-Mutawakkil in A.D. 850; Abú
Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyá ar-Rází, familiar to
medieval Europe as Rhazes; and 'Alí ibnu'l-'Abbás al-
Majúsí, called by the Latino-Barbari of the Middle
Ages "Haly Abbas." I briefly described four of the chief
works of these four great physicians, namely the "Para-
dise of Wisdom" (which, from its extreme rarity, has
hitherto remained unnoticed outside the Arabic Cata-
logues of the British Museum and Berlin); the *Háwí*
or "Continens"; the *Kámiluʻš-Ṣináʻat* or "Liber Re-
gius"; and the *Qánún* or "Canon of Medicine" of
Avicenna. I further expressed my agreement with the
view, advanced by Neuburger, Pagel and other historians

*Early Muslims' Love of Learning*

67

of Medicine, that, notwithstanding the greater celebrity achieved by Avicenna, Rází, by virtue of his clinical observations (some of which are preserved to us in a manuscript volume of the *Háwí* in the Bodleian Library¹), deserves to rank highest of the four, and perhaps of all the physicians produced by Islám during the thirteen centuries of its existence. To his work, and to that of the three other physicians just mentioned, I would gladly recur, should the brief time at my disposal allow, but other matters connected with the history, literature and status of Medicine in the Muslim world demand prior consideration, so that the whole field may be surveyed before any attempt is made to fill in details.

It has been already pointed out that the Muslims were rather the faithful transmitters of the ancient learning of Greece than the creators of a new system. Withington, in his excellent little *Medical History*², puts the case so well that I cannot do better than quote his words. "This display of physical vigour," he says, after describing the wonderful conquests of the Arabs in the seventh century, "was followed by an intellectual activity hardly less wonderful. A Byzantine emperor was astonished to find that the right of collecting and purchasing Greek manuscripts was among the terms dictated by a victorious barbarian, and that an illustrated copy of Dioscorides was the most acceptable present he could offer to a friendly chieftain. The philosophers of Constantinople were amazed by the appearance of Muslim writers whom they styled with reluctant admiration 'learned savages,' while the less cultured Christians soon came to look upon the wisdom of the Saracens as something more than human. It was this

¹ Marsh 156, ff. 239b-246 a. See pp. 50-3 *supra*.

² The Scientific Press, London, 1894, pp. 138-9.

5-2

68

Arabian Medicine. III

people who now took from the hands of unworthy successors of Galen and Hippocrates the flickering torch of Greek medicine. They failed to restore its ancient splendour, but they at least prevented its extinction, and they handed it back after five centuries burning more brightly than before."

"Five centuries," however, is an over-statement, for while Avicenna was still in the prime of life there was born in North Africa, probably in Tunis, a man of whose biography little is known, but who was destined to become famous, under the name of Constantinus Africanus, as the first to make known to Western Europe the learning of the Arabs through the medium of the Latin tongue¹. He attached himself to the celebrated medical school of Salerno—the "Civitas Hippocratica"— and died at Monte Casino, after a life of great literary activity, about A.D. 1087, exactly a century before the still more famous Oriental scholar and translator Gerard of Cremona. To these two, and to the Jewish physician Faraj ibn Sálim (Fararius or Faragut), who completed his translation of the "Continens" of Rází in A.D. 1279, medieval Europe was chiefly indebted for its knowledge of Arabian Medicine.

The transmission of ideas between East and West was effected, however, through other than literary channels. However great may have been the bitterness of feeling on both sides associated with the Crusades, it is astonishing how much friendly intercourse took place in the intervals of fighting between the Crusaders and their Saracen antagonists. Amongst many somewhat arid chronicles there has been preserved to us, and

¹ See an article on his work in vol. xxxvii (pp. 351-410) of Virchow's *Archiv* (Berlin, 1866) by that most erudite Orientalist Moritz Steinschneider.

Saracen Scorn of Frankish Medicine

69

rendered available by M. Hartwig Derenbourg in the
original Arabic accompanied by a French translation¹,
the illuminating memoirs of a Saracen Amir named
Usáma ibn Munqidh, who flourished in Syria in the
twelfth century, and spent most of his life in fighting the
Franks. He was born in A.D. 1095, the very year in which
the Crusaders captured Antioch and Jerusalem, and died
in A.D. 1188. It was during a temporary lull in the
fighting between A.D. 1140 and 1143 that his intercourse
with the Franks chiefly fell. In his discursive but
entertaining memoirs he discusses many of their customs
and characteristics which seemed to him curious or enter-
taining, and amongst other matters relates several strange
stories about their medical practice². At the request of
the Frankish Warden of the Castle of Munaytira in the
Lebanon, Usáma's uncle sent his Christian physician
Thábit to treat certain persons who lay sick there. Ten
days later Thábit returned, and was greeted with con-
gratulations on the rapidity with which he had cured
his patients. For these congratulations, however, there
was, as he explained, no occasion. On his arrival they
introduced to him two patients, a man suffering from an
abscess in the leg, and a consumptive woman. These he
proceeded to treat, the first by poultices, the second by
suitable diet and drugs. Both were progressing satis-
factorily when a Frankish doctor intervened, and, de-
nouncing the treatment pursued as useless, turned to
the male patient and asked him whether he would prefer
to die with two legs or to live with one. The patient
expressed his preference for the second alternative,
whereupon the Frankish doctor summoned a stalwart

¹ Leroux, Paris, 1886-1893.

² These will be found on pp. 97-101 of the Arabic text and
pp. 491-4 of the French translation.

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Arabian Medicine. III

man-at-arms with an axe, and bade him chop off the patient's leg at one blow. This he failed to do, and at the second blow the marrow was crushed out of the bone and the patient almost immediately expired. The Frankish doctor then turned his attention to the woman, and, after examining her, declared her to be possessed of a devil which was located in her head. He ordered her hair to be shaved off and that she should return to the ordinary diet of her compatriots, garlic and oil; and when she grew worse he made a deep cruciform incision on her head, exposing the bone, and rubbed salt into the wound, whereupon the woman also expired. "After this," concluded Thábit, "I asked if my services were any longer required, and, receiving a negative answer, returned home, having learned of their medical practice what had hitherto been unknown to me."

Usáma relates another similar anecdote on the authority of Guillaume de Bures¹, with whom he travelled from Acre to Tiberias. "There was with us in our country," said Guillaume, "a very doughty knight, who fell ill and was at the point of death. As a last resource we applied to a Christian priest of great authority and entrusted the patient to him, saying, 'Come with us to examine such-and-such a knight.' He agreed and set off with us. Our belief was that he had only to lay hands upon him to cure him. As soon as the priest saw the patient, he said, 'Bring me wax.' We brought him some, and he softened it and made [two plugs] like the joints of a finger, each of which he thrust into one of the patient's nostrils; whereupon he expired. 'He is dead,' we exclaimed. 'Yes,' replied the priest; 'he was suffering, and I plugged his nostrils so that he might die and be at peace!'"

¹ *Op. cit.*, text, p. 101; translation, p. 494.

Medicine amongst the Crusaders

71

To the Arabs of that period, then, as we can well
understand, Frankish medicine appeared most barbarous
and primitive compared with their own; and it is not
surprising that, when Usáma was himself attacked by
a chill accompanied by rigors at Shayzar, he preferred
the services of an Arab physician, Shaykh Abu'l-Wafá
Tamím, to those of a Frankish doctor¹. Yet, in justice
to the Franks, he relates two cases of successful
treatment by their medical practitioners; one of a
certain Bernard, treasurer to Count Foulques of
Anjou, whom Usáma describes as "one of the most
accursed of the Franks and the foulest of them," whose
death he earnestly desired and prayed for²; and the
other of the scrofulous child of an Arab artisan named
Abu'l-Fath³. The former suffered from an injury to the
leg caused by a kick from his horse, and fourteen
incisions had been made which refused to heal until
the Frankish doctor finally consulted removed all the
ointments and plasters which had been applied to the
wounds, and bathed them with very strong vinegar, as
a result of which treatment they gradually healed, and
the patient, to quote Usáma's expression, "was cured
and arose like the Devil," or, as we should say, ready
for any fresh mischief. The scrofulous boy had been
taken to Antioch by his father, who had business there,
and aroused the compassion of a Frank with whom
they foregathered. "Swear to me by thy faith," said he
to the father, "that, if I impart to thee a remedy to heal
him, thou wilt accept no pecuniary recompense from
anyone whom thou mayst treat therewith, and I will
give thee the recipe." The father gave the required

¹ *Op. cit.*, text, p. 137; translation, p. 491.

² *Op. cit.*, text, p. 98; translation, pp. 492-3.

³ *Op. cit.*, text, pp. 98-9; translation, pp. 493-4.

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Arabian Medicine. III

assurance, and was instructed to take unpounded soda, heat it and mix it with olive oil and strong vinegar, and apply the mixture to the strumous ulcers in the child's neck, this to be followed by the application of what Usáma calls "burnt lead" mixed with butter or grease. The boy, we read, was cured, and the same treatment was subsequently employed with success in other cases.

The above anecdotes do not exhaust the medical material contained in these interesting memoirs. There was a somewhat notable Arab Christian physician named Ibn Buṭlán who died about A.D. 1063, and was the author of numerous medical works (enumerated by Leclerc¹ and Brockelmann²), of the most celebrated of which, the *Taqwímuš-Šiḥa*, a Latin translation entitled *Tacuini Sanitatis* was printed at Strassburg in A.D. 1531 (or 1532.) A copy of this work is included amongst the Arabic MSS. of this college. Ibn Buṭlán, in the course of his extensive travels, was for a time in attendance on Usáma's great-grandfather at Shayzar, and our author records some of the anecdotes about him still current in the household when he was young. One of these is of a dropsical man whose case Ibn Buṭlán gave up as hopeless, and whom he subsequently met completely cured of his malady. In reply to enquiries as to the treatment which had proved so successful, the man declared no one had attempted to do anything to alleviate his misery except his old mother, who had daily given him a piece of bread soaked in vinegar which she took from a jar. Ibn Buṭlán asked to see the jar, poured out the remains of the vinegar, and discovered at the bottom two vipers which had fallen into it and become partly macerated or dissolved. "O my

¹ *Hist. de la Médecine Arabe*, vol. i, pp. 489-492.

² *Gesch. d. Arab. Litt.*, vol. i, p. 483.

Medicine in Arabic Literature

73

son,” he exclaimed, “none but God, mighty and glorious
is He, could have cured thee with a decoction of vipers
in vinegar¹!”

On another occasion a man came to Ibn Buṭlán in
his surgery at Aleppo complaining of hoarseness and
complete loss of voice, and stating in reply to enquiries
as to his occupation that he was a sifter of earth. Ibn
Buṭlán made him drink half a pint of strong vinegar,
whereupon he was presently seized with vomiting and
threw up a quantity of mud with the vinegar, after
which his throat was cleared and his speech became
normal. Ibn Buṭlán said to his son and his pupils who
were present, “Treat no one with this remedy or you
will kill him. As for this man, some of the dust from
the sieve had stuck in his gullet and nothing but vinegar
could have dislodged it².”

I have already observed how general was the
interest taken in medical topics in the medieval Muslim
world. A very popular branch of literature, both in
Arabic and Persian, was constituted by collections of
strange and quaint anecdotes, called *Nawádir*, in which
the historical or quasi-historical stories are grouped
under appropriate headings. In such books a special
section is often devoted to Medicine and Physicians.
The material thus afforded, though it has not hitherto
attracted much attention, appears to me worthy of some
notice.

One of the older Arabic books of this sort is a work
entitled *al-Faraj ba'da'sh-Shidda* (“Joy after Sorrow,”
or better, perhaps, “Relief after Distress”) by the Qádi
Abu 'Alí at-Tanúkhí, who was born in A.D. 939 and

¹ *Op. cit.*, text, p. 135; translation, pp. 488–9.

² *Op. cit.*, text, pp. 135–6; translation, p. 489.

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died in A.D. 994. This book was printed in Cairo in 1903-4 in two volumes. It comprises 14 chapters, of which the tenth (pp. 94-104 of vol. ii) deals with remarkable cases and contains 15 anecdotes, some of which are trivial or disgusting, while others are of considerable interest. Two of them, which I shall notice first, are connected with the great physician Abú Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyá ar-Rází (Rhazes) of whom I spoke last year in the second of my two lectures, and with whom our author was almost contemporary.

The first of these¹ is about a young man of Baghdad
who came to Rhazes complaining of haematemesis.
Careful examination failed to reveal the cause or explain
the symptom. The patient was in despair, believing
that where Rhazes failed, none could succeed. Rhazes,
touched alike by his distress and his faith, then pro-
ceeded to question him very carefully as to the water
he had drunk on his journey, and ascertained that in
some cases it had been drawn from stagnant ponds.
“When I come to-morrow,” said he to the patient, “I
will treat you, and not leave you until you are cured, on
condition that you will order your servants to obey me
in all that I command them concerning thee.” The
patient gave the required promise, and Rhazes returned
next day with two vessels filled with a water-weed
called in Arabic *Tuḥlub* and in Persian *Jáma-i-Ghúk*
(“Frog’s coat”) or *Pashm-i-Wazagh*² (“Frog’s wool”),
which he ordered the patient to swallow. The patient,
having swallowed a considerable quantity, declared

¹ Vol. ii, p. 96. The story is also given by Ibn Abí Uṣaybiʿa,
vol. i, pp. 311-312.

² Identified by Achundow (pp. 231 and 383) with *Lemna* or *Herba
Lentis Palustris*, the *φακός* of Dioscorides, in German *Wasserlinde*. At
the present day it is called by the Persians *Jul-i-Wazagh*.

Celebrated Cures of Rhazes

75

himself unable to take any more, whereupon Rhazes ordered the servants to hold him on his back on the ground and open his mouth, into which he continued to cram more and more of the nauseous substance until violent vomiting ensued. Examination of the vomit revealed a leech which was the source of the trouble, and with the expulsion of which the patient regained his health. This same anecdote occurs in the Persian collection of stories by 'Awfī of which I shall shortly speak, and it is there added that the leech when swallowed in the drinking-water had attached itself to the mouth of the patient's stomach and there remained until induced to transfer itself to the more congenial water-weed.

In the next anecdote¹ Rhazes is represented as describing the case of a dropsical boy whose father consulted him at Bisṭám in N.E. Persia as he was returning from his celebrated cure of the Amír of Khurásán², for whom he composed his “Liber Almansoris.” Rhazes declared the case to be hopeless, and advised the father to let his son eat and drink whatever he pleased. Twelve months later he returned to the same town, and, to his great astonishment, found the boy completely restored to health. On enquiring how this had come about, he was told that the boy, despairing of health and life, and wishing to put an end to his existence, had one day observed a great snake approach a bowl of *madíra* (a kind of broth prepared with sour milk) which was standing on the ground, drink some of it, and then vomit into the rest, which

¹ *Al-Faraj*, vol. ii, pp. 103-104, and Ibn Abí Ušaybiʿa, *vol. i*, p. 312.

² Really the governor of Ray, Manṣúr ibn Isḥáq ibn Aḥmad. See my translation of the *Chahár Maqála* (“E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series, xi, 2, p. 150).

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shortly changed colour. Thinking to put an end to his
life with this poisonous mixture he consumed the greater
part of it, after which he fell into a deep sleep, from which
he awoke in a copious perspiration, and, after violent
purging, found that he was quit of his dropsy and his
appetite had returned.

A third anecdote similar to the last, related by a
man named Abú 'Alí 'Umar ibn Yahyá al-'Alawí¹, con-
cerns a fellow-pilgrim from Kúfa who suffered from
dropsy and was kidnapped with his camel by Arab
marauders. One day his captors entered the hut where
he was lying, bringing some snakes which they had
caught, and which they proceeded to roast and eat after
they had cut off their heads and tails. He, hoping that
this unaccustomed food would poison him, craved a
portion and ate it, when, after experiencing precisely the
same symptoms as the sufferer mentioned in the last
story, he similarly found himself cured of his sickness.

A fourth anecdote² is of a boy who suffered from
violent pain and throbbing in the stomach for which
no cause or cure could be found, though he was
examined by many physicians of Ahwáz in S.W. Persia,
a well-known town situated near the once famous
medical school of Jundí-Shápúr, of which I spoke
in a previous lecture. Finally he was sent home, and
there a passing physician, not named, cross-examined
him at length and discovered that his ailment dated
from a day when he had eaten pomegranates stored in
a cow-house. The physician next day brought him
broth made with the flesh of a fat puppy, and bade him
take as much as he could of it, while refusing to make
known its nature. Then he gave him to eat a quantity
of melon, and two hours later beer mixed with hot

¹ *Al-Faraj*, vol. ii, p. 100.

² *Ibid.*, vol. ii, pp. 96-7.

Dropsy cured by a Diet of Locusts

77

water, after which he informed him how the broth had been prepared. Thereupon the patient was violently sick, and in his vomit the physician presently discovered "a black thing like a large date-stone which moved," and which proved to be a sheep- or cattle-tick which had entered the pomegranate, been accidentally swallowed by the boy, and attached itself to the coats of his stomach, from which, like the leech in a previous anecdote, it was induced to detach itself by being presented with a more attractive substance.

The case of another dropsical patient forms the subject of a fifth of these anecdotes. He was, after being dosed with various drugs, pronounced incurable by the physicians of Baghdad, and thereupon begged that he might be allowed to eat and drink what he pleased, and not, as he expressed it, be "destroyed by dieting." One day he saw a man selling cooked locusts, of which he bought and ate a large quantity. Violent purging followed this repast and lasted three days, at the end of which he was so weak that his life was despaired of, but he gradually recovered and was entirely cured of his dropsy. On the fifth day, being able to walk abroad, he met one of the physicians who had seen him before, and who was amazed at his recovery, about which he questioned him. "These were no ordinary locusts," said the physician, when he had heard the story; "I should like you to point out to me the man who sold them to you." The seller being found and questioned, said that he collected the locusts in a village some miles from Baghdad, whether, for a small reward, he accompanied the physician, who found the locusts in a field in which grew quantities of the herb called *Mádharyún* (identified by Schlimmer and Achundow as *Daphne oleoides*, the Laurel-spurge or Spurge-flax),

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known to be beneficial in small doses for dropsy, but
too dangerous to be commonly prescribed.¹ The double
coction which it had undergone in the locusts' bodies
had, however, so mitigated its violence that its results
had in this case proved wholly beneficial.

Other anecdotes in this book, on which I have not
time to dwell, include a cure of apoplexy by flagellation,
of pleurisy by a scorpion-bite, and of paralysis by a
decoction of colocynth in milk.

The Persian collection of anecdotes to which I
alluded above was compiled by Muḥammad ‘Awfī
about A.D. 1230, and is entitled *Jawāmī’u’l-Ḥikāyát wa
Lawāmī’u’r-Riwāyát*. It is a gigantic work, comprising
four volumes, each consisting of twenty-five chapters,
and has never yet been published; but I am fortunate
enough to possess one complete MS. and another of
the first volume. The twentieth chapter of this volume
concerns Physicians, and comprises nine anecdotes, four
of which are taken from at-Tanúkhi’s work “Relief after
Distress,” described above. In only one of the five new
stories is mention made of Rhazes, who is represented
as curing a patient of intussusception or obstruction of
the intestines by giving him two drachms of quicksilver.
In the remaining anecdotes there is little worth notice
except one aphorism and one story. The aphorism,
uttered by an unnamed physician to a patient, is as
follows: “Know that I and thou and the disease are
three factors mutually antagonistic. If thou wilt side
with me, not neglecting what I enjoin on thee and

¹ See the *Qánún* of Avicenna (ed. Rome, 1593), p. 205, and the Latin translation (Venice, 1544), p. 147, where two drachms of this “Mezereon” are said to be fatal to man. In the *Burmān-i-Qāṭī* and the *Farhang-i-Nāṣirī* the form *Mázaryún* (with j instead of s) is given.

Early Traditions of Anaesthesia

79

refraining from such food as I shall forbid thee, then we
shall be two against one and will overcome the disease.”
The story, which concerns Aristotle and an Indian
physician named Sarbát or Sarnáb—who came to him
incognito as a disciple in order to study his methods,
but revealed himself at a critical stage in the trephining
of a patient—is a very absurd one, about a millipede or
ear-wig (*hazár-páy* or *gúsh-khúrak*) which entered the
patient’s ear and attached itself to his brain. The in-
teresting point in it is that, before beginning the opera-
tion, Aristotle “gave him a drug so that he became
unconscious.” I have only met with one earlier reference
to anaesthesia in Persian literature, namely the well-
known passage in the *Sháh-náma*, or “Book of Kings,”
of Firdawsí¹ (composed early in the eleventh century
of our era) describing the Caesarean section practised
on Rúdába, the mother of Rustam, at the time of his
birth, though in this case wine was the agent used to
produce unconsciousness, while the operator was a
*Múbadh* or Zoroastrian priest.

Another Persian book, entitled *Chahár Maqála*
(the “Four Discourses”), and composed about A.D. 1155
by a court-poet of Samarqand named Niẓámí-i-‘Arúḍí,
affords more copious material for our present purpose
than either of the books mentioned above. The author
treats of four classes of experts whom he considers in-
dispensable at a properly constituted court, to wit
Secretaries of State, Poets, Astrologers and Physicians;
for, as he observes with propriety, the business of kings
cannot be conducted without competent secretaries;
their triumphs and victories will not be immortalized
without eloquent poets; their enterprises will not succeed

¹ Ed. Turner Macan, vol. i, pp. 162-3.

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unless undertaken at seasons adjudged propitious by
sagacious astrologers; while health, the basis of all
happiness and activity, can only be secured by the
services of able and trustworthy physicians. Each Dis-
course, therefore, deals with one of these classes, in the
order given above, and, after some preliminary remarks
on the qualifications requisite for success in the pro-
fession in question, gives a number of anecdotes (about
ten as a rule) illustrating the author's views. These are
of special value as being for the greater part derived
from his own recollections and experience. Twenty
years ago I published a complete translation of this
work in the *Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society*¹;
ten years later a critical text with Persian notes was
prepared by a learned Persian friend of mine, Mírzá
Muḥammad Khán of Qazwín, and published in the
“E. J. W. Gibb Memorial” Series²; and I am now
engaged on a revised and annotated translation in
which special attention has been given to the medical
anecdotes. The fact that this book is now reasonably
accessible renders it unnecessary for me to speak at
greater length about it, and I shall confine myself to a
few remarks on the Fourth Discourse dealing with
Physicians.

“The physician,” says our author, “should be of
tender disposition, of wise and gentle nature, and more
especially an acute observer, capable of benefiting
everyone by accurate diagnosis, that is to say, by rapid
deduction of the unknown from the known. And no

¹ July and October, 1899. The separate reprint, now exhausted, comprises, with the Index, 139 pages.

² It is vol. xi of this series, and was published in 1910. The revised and annotated translation, now in the Press, will constitute vol. xi, 2, of the same series.

*Persian Medical Studies in A.D. 1156*

81

physician can be of tender disposition if he fails to recognize the nobility of man; nor of philosophical nature unless he be acquainted with Logic; nor an acute observer unless he be strengthened by God's guidance; and he who is not an accurate observer will not arrive at a correct understanding of the cause of any ailment."

After developing this thesis, and relating the case of a sick man healed by prayer, the author gives an in-structive list of the books which should be read by the aspirant to medical science, which range from the *Aphorisms* of Hippocrates and the Sixteen Treatises of Galen to the great "Thesaurus" of Medicine compiled in Persian for the Sháh of Khwárazm, or Khiva, by Sayyid Isma'il of Jurján only twenty or thirty years earlier. "But," he concludes, "if the student desires to be independent of other works, he may rest satisfied with the *Qánún* of Avicenna," whom he puts second only to Aristotle, and praises in the highest terms as the only thinker during fifteen centuries who has won to the inmost essence of the Aristotelian philosophy and travelled the road of his great predecessor's pre-eminence.

The anecdotes which follow are of a somewhat different type from those we have hitherto considered; we find none of those grotesque stories of abnormal parasitic invasion, or of the therapeutic virtues of vipers and locusts. On the other hand elementary methods of psychotherapeusis form the subject-matter of no less than four of the narratives, and several of these have passed into general Persian literature, even poetry, and have thus attained considerable notoriety. We may take first two of the best known, wherein the emotions of anger and shame are employed respectively in the treatment of rheumatic affections of the joints.

B. A. M.

6

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The great physician Rhazes was summoned to Transoxiana to attend the Amír Mansúr, who was suffering from a rheumatic affection of the joints which baffled all his medical attendants. On arriving at the Oxus, Rhazes was so much alarmed at its size and the small and fragile appearance of the boat in which he was invited to embark that he declined to proceed further, until the King's messengers bound him hand and foot, threw him into the boat, and carried him across by force, though otherwise they treated him with the utmost respect and even apologized for the use of violence, begging him to bear them no grudge. Rhazes assured them that he harboured no resentment and explained the motive of his resistance. "I know," said he, "that every year many thousand persons cross the Oxus safely, but, had I chanced to be drowned, people would have said, 'What a fool Muhammad ibn Zakariyyá was to expose himself to this risk of his own free will.' But, being carried across by force, had I then perished people would have pitied, not blamed me."

On reaching Bukhárá he tried various methods of treatment on the Amír without success. Finally he said to him, "To-morrow I shall try a new treatment, but it will cost you the best horse and best mule in your stables." The Amír agreed and placed the animals at his disposal. Next day Rhazes brought the Amír to a hot bath outside the city, tied up the horse and the mule, saddled and bridled, outside, and entered the hot room of the bath alone with his patient, to whom he administered douches of hot water and a draught which he had prepared "till such time" says the narrator, "as the humours in his joints were matured. Then he went out, put on his clothes, and, taking a knife in his hand, came in, and stood for a while reviling the Amír, saying, 'Thou

Psychotherapeusis (Rhazes)

83

didst order me to be bound and cast into the boat, and
didst conspire against my life. If I do not destroy thee
as a punishment for this, my name is not Muḥammad
ibn Zakariyyá!' The Amír was furious, and, partly from
anger, partly from fear, sprang to his feet." Rhazes at
once fled from the bath to where his servant was awaiting
him outside with the horse and the mule, rode off at full
gallop, and did not pause in his flight until he had crossed
the Oxus and reached Merv, whence he wrote to the
Amír as follows¹:

"May the life of the King be prolonged in health and authority! Agreeably to my undertaking I treated you to the best of my ability. There was, however, a deficiency in the natural caloric, and this treatment would have been unduly protracted, so I abandoned it in favour of psychotherapeusis ('iláj-i-nafsánt), and, when the peccant humours had undergone sufficient coction in the bath, I deliberately provoked you in order to increase the natural caloric, which thus gained sufficient strength to dissolve the already softened humours. But henceforth it is inexpedient that we should meet."

The Amír, having recovered from his anger, was
delighted to find himself restored to health and freedom
of movement, and caused search to be made everywhere
for the physician, but in vain, until on the seventh day
his servant returned with the horse and mule and the
letter cited above. As Rhazes persisted in his resolution
not to return, the Amír rewarded him with a robe of
honour, a cloak, a turban, arms, a male and female slave,
and a horse fully caparisoned, and further assigned to

¹ I have slightly abridged and otherwise modified the letter, of which the literal translation will be found on p. 117 of the separate reprint of my translation in the *J. R. A. S.* for 1899, and on p. 84 of the forthcoming revised translation.

6—2

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him a yearly pension of 2000 gold *dínárs* and 200 ass-loads of corn.

This anecdote is cited in a well-known Persian ethical work, the *Akhláq-i-Jalálí*, composed three hundred years later than the *Chahár Maqála*. In the other anecdote which I place in the same category the patient is a woman in the King's household who, while bending down to lay the table, is attacked by a sudden "rheumatic swelling of the joints," and is unable to assume an erect posture. The King's physician (not named), being commanded to cure her, and having no medicaments at hand, has recourse to "psychic treatment" (*tadbír-i-nafsání*) and, by removing first her veil and then her skirt, calls to his aid the emotion of shame, whereby, in the author's words, "a flush of heat was produced within her which dissolved the rheumatic humour," so that she stood upright completely cured. This story is retold by the great poet Jámí, who flourished about the end of the fifteenth century, in his *Silsilatu'dh-Dhahab* or "Chain of Gold," but, much more important, it has been found by Mírzá Muḥammad Khán in a manuscript of Avicenna's rare and unpublished *Kitábu'l-Mabda' wa'l-Ma'ád* (the "Book of the Origin and the Return"), whence the author of the *Chahár Maqála* avowedly took it¹. Avicenna, therefore, evidently believed the story, though he too omits the name of the physician, only stating that he was in the service of one of the Sámánid rulers, who flourished in Khurásán and Transoxiana in the tenth century.

Of both the two next anecdotes Avicenna is again the hero. When in his flight from Maḥmúd of Ghazna he came incognito to Jurján or Gurgán (the ancient

¹ See p. 73 of the text and p. 242 of the notes in vol. xi of the "E. J. W. Gibb Memorial" Series.

Avicenna's Diagnosis of Love

85

Hyrcania) by the Caspian Sea, a relative of the ruler of that province lay sick of a malady which baffled all the local doctors. Avicenna, though his identity was then unknown, was invited to give his opinion, and, after examining the patient, requested the collaboration of someone who knew all the districts and towns of the province, and who repeated their names while Avicenna kept his finger on the patient's pulse. At the mention of a certain town he felt a flutter in the pulse. "Now," said he, "I need someone who knows all the houses, streets and quarters of this town." Again when a certain street was mentioned the same phenomenon was repeated, and once again when the names of the inhabitants of a certain household were enumerated. Then Avicenna said, "It is finished. This lad is in love with such-and-such a girl, who lives in such-and-such a house, in such-and-such a street, in such-and-such a quarter of such-and-such a town; and the girl's face is the patient's cure." So the marriage was solemnized at a fortunate hour chosen by Avicenna, and thus the cure was completed.

For this story again, or at least for its essential feature, we have the best authority, namely Avicenna's own statement in the *Qánún*¹ in the section devoted to Love, which is classed under cerebral or mental diseases, together with somnolence, insomnia, amnesia, mania, hydrophobia, melancholia, and the like. In the Latin translation² this section is hardly recognizable under the title *De Ilixi*, with *alhasch* as a marginal variant, both these monstrosities being intended to represent

¹ See p. 316 of the Arabic text printed at Rome in A.D. 1593. Ibn Abi Uṣaybi'a (vol. ii, p. 128) relates very similar anecdotes of Galen and of Rashidu'd-Dín Abú HALÍqa.

² Venice, 1544, f. 208b.

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the Arabic *al-'Ishq*, "Love." After describing the symptoms, and especially the irregularities of the pulse, Avicenna says:

> "And hereby it is possible to arrive at the identity of the beloved person, if the patient will not reveal it, such knowledge affording one means of treatment. The device whereby this may be effected is that many names should be mentioned and repeated while the finger is retained on the pulse, and when it becomes very irregular and almost ceases, one should then repeat the process. I have tried this method repeatedly, and have discovered the name of the beloved. Then, in like manner, mention the streets, dwellings, arts, crafts, families and countries, joining each one with the name of the beloved, and all the time feeling the pulse, so that when it alters on the mention of any one thing several times, you will infer from this all particulars about the beloved as regards name, appearance and occupation. We have ourselves tried this plan, and have thereby arrived at knowledge which was valuable. Then, if you can discover no cure except to unite the two in such wise as is sanctioned by religion and law, you will do this. We have seen cases where health and strength were completely restored and flesh regained, after the patient had become greatly attenuated and suffered from severe chronic diseases and protracted accesses of fever from lack of strength resulting from excessive love, when he was accorded union with his beloved......in a very short time, so that we were astonished thereat and realized the subordination of [human] nature to mental imaginations."

We find a further allusion to this treatment in a later medical encyclopaedia to which I have already alluded, the *Dhakhira-i-Khwárazmsháhí*, composed between

*Love's Malady in the* Mathnawi

87

A.D. 1111 and 1136, and notable as the first great system of Medicine written in the Persian instead of in the Arabic language. Here also the author, Sayyid Isma'il of Jurján, after repeating the substance of Avicenna's directions, adds: "Master Abú 'Alí (i.e. Avicenna), upon whom be God's mercy, says, 'I have tried this plan and have so discovered who the beloved object was,'" and appends a fairly close translation of Avicenna's concluding words as to the rapid recovery of the patient when his desire is fulfilled.

Rather more than a hundred years later, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the great mystical poet Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí, who may be called the Dante of Persia, made this theme the subject of the allegorical anecdote which comes at the beginning of his celebrated *Mathnawí*. This anecdote describes how a king while hunting saw a very beautiful girl, fell in love with her, and married her. To his great distress she forthwith sickened, nor could the physicians summoned to her bedside alleviate her malady or assuage her suffering, because, when assuring the king that they could cure her, they omitted the saving clause (*istithná*) "Please God." Hence all their drugs produced the opposite effects to those intended and desired; oxymel (*sirkan-gabín*) only increased her biliousness, and myrobolans (*halíla*) desiccated instead of relaxing. Finally, in answer to the king's prayers, a "divine physician" (*tabíb-i-iláhí*) appears, and, after a careful examination of the patient, announces that the treatment hitherto pursued has been wholly mischievous and based on a wrong diagnosis. He then asks to be left alone with the patient and proceeds to question her about the towns where she has previously lived, since, he explains, treatment varies according to place of origin or sojourn. While

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talking to her about her past history he keeps his finger
on her pulse, but observes no sign of emotion until
Samarqand is mentioned, and again later at the name
of the Sar-i-pul or "Bridge-end" quarter and the street
called Ghátafar'. In short he finally discovers, in pre-
cisely the way indicated by Avicenna, that she is in
love with a certain goldsmith living in that quarter
of Samarqand. Thereupon, having reassured her and
promised her recovery, he instructs the king to send
messengers to Samarqand to invite the goldsmith to his
court and offer him handsome remuneration. The un-
suspecting goldsmith comes blithely, flattered by the
king's gracious words, fine gifts and fair promises, and
on his arrival, by the "divine physician's" instructions,
is married to the girl, who in the course of six months re-
covers her health and good looks. Then the physician
begins to administer to the goldsmith a slow poison
which causes him to become "ugly, displeasing and
sallow," so that the girl wearies of him before his death,
which is not long delayed, places her once more at the
disposal of the king, whose bride she now becomes.
Into the allegorical meaning of this outwardly immoral
story I have not time to enter now, but this purely
literary use of medical material indirectly borrowed from
Avicenna himself appears to me to be of considerable
interest.

From the "Four Discourses" I shall only cite one
more anecdote, of which again Avicenna is the hero.
A certain prince of the House of Buwayh was afflicted
with melancholia and suffered from the delusion that he
was a cow. "Every day," says the author, "he would
low like a cow, causing annoyance to everyone, and

¹ This actually exists. See V. Zhukovski's *РАЗВАЛИНЫ СТАРАГО МЕРВА*, p. 171, n. 1.

Avicenna cures a Melancholic

89

crying, 'Kill me, so that a good stew may be prepared
from my flesh'; until matters reached such a pass that
he would eat nothing, while the physicians were unable
to do him any good." Finally Avicenna, who was at
this time acting as prime minister to 'Alá'u'd-Dawla ibn
Kákúya, was persuaded to take the case in hand, which
in spite of the pressure of public and private business,
political, scientific and literary, with which he was over-
whelmed, he consented to do. First of all he sent a
message to the patient bidding him be of good cheer
because the butcher was coming to slaughter him,
whereat, we are told, the sick man rejoiced. Some time
afterwards Avicenna, holding a knife in his hand, entered
the sick-room, saying, "Where is this cow, that I may
kill it?" The patient lowed like a cow to indicate where
he was. By Avicenna's orders he was laid on the ground
bound hand and foot. Avicenna then felt him all over
and said, "He is too lean, and not ready to be killed;
he must be fattened." Then they offered him suitable
food, of which he now partook eagerly, and gradually
he gained strength, got rid of his delusion, and was
completely cured. The narrator concludes, "All wise
men will perceive that one cannot heal by such methods
of treatment save by virtue of pre-eminent intelligence,
perfect science and unerring acumen." This anecdote
also has been versified by Jámí in his "Chain of Gold"
(Silsilatu'dh-Dhahab) composed in A.D. 1485, three
hundred and thirty years after the "Four Discourses,"
but I can find no allusion to any such method of treat-
ment in the article on Melancholia in the Qánún of
Avicenna.

Before leaving this topic, I must refer to an anecdote
given by the poet Nizámí in his "Treasury of Secrets"
(Makhzanu'l-Asrár), where suggestion is employed not

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to heal but to destroy. This story relates how the rivalry
between two court physicians finally reached such a
point that they challenged one another to a duel or ordeal
by poison, it being agreed that each should take a poison
supplied by his antagonist, of which he should then en-
deavour to counteract the effects by a suitable antidote.
The first prepared a poisonous draught "the fiercely
of which would have melted black stone"; his rival
drained the cup and at once took an antidote which
rendered it innocuous. It was now his turn, and he picked
a rose from the garden, breathed an incantation over it,
and bade his antagonist smell it, whereupon the latter
at once fell down dead. That his death was due simply
to fear and not to any poisonous or magical property of
the rose is clearly indicated by the poet:

دشمن از آن کُل که فسون خوان بداد

ترس بدو چیوه شد و جان بداد

آن بعلاج از تنِ خود زهر بُرد

وین بیکی کُل ز تو هم بمرد

"Through this rose which the spell-breather had given him
Fear overmastered the foe and he gave up the ghost.
That one by treatment expelled the poison from his body,
While this one died of a rose from fear."

I have little doubt that suggestion played an important part in Arabian Medicine, and that wider reading in Arabic and Persian books (often sadly discursive and un-systematic, and, of course, never provided with indexes) would yield a much richer harvest in this field. But the people of the East have much of the child's love of the marvellous; they like their kings to be immensely great and powerful, their queens and princesses incomparably

Miracles expected from Medicine

91

beautiful, their ministers or wazirs abnormally saga-
cious, and their physicians superhumanly discerning and
resourceful. This unbounded faith, which is in fact most
embarrassing to one who practises medicine in the East,
is sustained and extended by such sensational stories as
I have cited. Rhazes did this, they will tell you, and
Avicenna that, and are not you, the heir of all the ages,
greater than these, nay, even than Hippocrates and
Galen? Yet the genuine case-book of Rhazes, of which,
almost alone in Arabic literature, a fragment has happily
been preserved to us in a Bodleian MS.¹ mentioned in a
former lecture, altogether lacks this sensational quality,
and it is to the credit of that great physician that he
should have chosen to record precisely those cases which
puzzled him at first or baffled him altogether.

In the opening lecture of this course I explained
that, while the Golden Age of Islamic or Arabian
literature and science was the first century or two of
the ‘Abbásid Caliphate of Baghdad (i.e. from A.D. 750
onwards), a high level of culture continued to be main-
tained until the awful catastrophe of the Mongol or
Tartar invasion of the thirteenth century inflicted on it
a blow from which it has never recovered. The Caliphate
was overthrown and its metropolis sacked and laid waste
in A.D. 1258, and though the surviving scholars of the
younger generation carried on the sound tradition of
scholarship for a while longer, there is, broadly speaking,
a difference not only of degree but of kind between
the literary and scientific work done before and after
the thirteenth century throughout the lands of Islám.
Medicine and history owed their comparative immunity
to the desire of the savage conquerors for health and

¹ Marsh 156, ff. 239b-246a. See pp. 50-53 *supra*.

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Arabian Medicine. III

fame, and in the next lecture I shall have to speak of
at least one writer who flourished even as late as the
fourteenth century. Of course from that time to the
present day there has been no lack of medical literature
of a sort: some idea of the number of medical works
composed in Persian alone may be gathered from Adolf
Fonahn's *Zur Quellenkunde der Persischen Medizin*,
published at Leipzig in 1910. The author of this
excellent and painstaking book enumerates over 400
Persian works (very few of which have been published)
dealing entirely or partly with medical subjects, and
adds a very useful bibliography¹ and short bio-
graphical notices of 25 of the most notable Persian
physicians² and writers on Medicine who flourished
from the end of the tenth to the beginning of the
eighteenth century, excluding, however, such men as
Rhazes, “Haly Abbas” and Avicenna who, though
Persian by race, wrote in Arabic. This vernacular
medical literature of Persia remains almost unexplored,
nor could it, as a rule, be explored with advantage until
a much more thorough examination of the older Arabic
literature has been effected. A thorough knowledge of
the contents of the *Hāwī* or “Continens,” the *Kitābu’l-
*Malikī* or “Liber Regius” and the *Qánún* of Avicenna
would be necessary in order to decide whether any sub-
stantial addition to, or modification of, these classics
was effected by the later writers. Of one great Persian
system of Medicine, compiled in the twelfth century, the
*Dhakhíra-i-Khwárazmsháhí*, which good fortune has
rendered accessible to me in several manuscripts, I pro-
pose to speak in the next lecture. Only two other
Persian medical works have hitherto, so far as I know,
attracted much attention in Europe—Abú Mansúr

¹ pp. 135–140.

² pp. 129–134.

*Introduction of Western Medicine to the East* 93

Muwaffaq of Herát's *Materia Medica*, composed about A.D. 950, and the illustrated *Anatomy* of Manṣúr ibn Muhammad, composed in A.D. 1396. The oldest known Persian manuscript in Europe, copied by the poet Asadí in A.D. 1055, is the unique original of the former, and was produced at Vienna by Dr F. R. Seligmann in 1859 in a most beautiful and artistic edition on which excellent work has been done by Abdul-Chalig Achundow, Dr Paul Horn and Professor Jolly. The anatomical diagrams contained in the latter have especially attracted the attention of Dr Karl Sudhoff, who published them from the India Office MS. in *Studien zur Geschichte der Medizin*¹, and who has suggested that they represent an ancient tradition going back, perhaps, even to the Alexandrian School. Of this work I have recently acquired two MSS. in which some of the illustrations show variations which may prove of interest.

Before concluding this lecture I may add a few words about the introduction of modern European Medicine into the Muslim East, where the old system, which we call Arabian and the Muslims Greek (*Tibb-i-Yúnání*), still maintains itself, while slowly giving ground, especially in Persia and India. When I was at Tîhrán in 1887 Dr Tholozon, physician to His late Majesty Náṣiru'd-Dín Sháh, kindly enabled me to attend the meetings of the *Majlis-i-Šiḥhat*, or Council of Public Health, in the Persian capital, and a majority of the physicians present at that time knew no medicine but that of Avicenna. Since that time a good many young Persians (though far fewer than one would wish) have come to Europe to study, but even in the middle of the nineteenth century much was being done by such men as Dr Polak, the Austrian, and Dr Schlimmer, the

¹ Heft 4, Leipzig, 1908.

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Arabian Medicine. III

Dutchman, who went out to Persia to organize the new Polytechnic and Military Colleges. Dr Schlimmer's *Terminologie Médico-Pharmaceutique et Anthropologique Française-Persane*, lithographed at Tïhrán in 1874, is, indeed, invaluable to students of Oriental Medicine by reason of the mass of information it contains and the careful identifications of the Persian names of plants, drugs and diseases. One of the earliest books printed in Persia with movable types was a treatise on inoculation for small-pox (which I have not seen) published at Tabríz in 1825¹. This very same year marks the introduction of modern medical science into Egypt by Clot Bey and other French scientists invited thither by the Khedive Muḥammad ‘Alí, and the establishment of the hospital at Abú Za‘bal near Heliopolis, which was transferred a year later to its present site at Qaṣru’l-‘Ayní. Egyptian students had been sent to Italy in 1813 and 1816 and to England in 1818 to study military and naval science, ship-building, printing and mechanics, but the first medical students seem to have been sent to Paris, no doubt at the instigation of Clot Bey, in 1826. An excellent account of this latest revival of science (an-*Nahḍatū’l-Akhíra*, as it is called in Arabic) is given by that indefatigable writer the late Jurjí Zaydán, a Christian Syrian domiciled in Egypt, in his *History of Arabic Literature*², published in Cairo in 1911-14. To speak of it in detail would lead me too far from my subject, but two points connected with its history have a certain bearing on the revival of Greek learning in the East in the eighth century, which I dealt with in my first lecture last year. I spoke there of the

¹ See E. G. Browne's *Press and Poetry of Modern Persia* (Cambridge, 1914), p. 7.

² *Ta'ríkhu Adábi 'l-Lughati 'l-'Arabiyya*, vol. iv, pp. 24 et seqq.

Modern Egyptian Translators into Arabic 95

prejudice against dissection; and it is interesting to note
that Clot Bey's struggles against this same prejudice
brought him within measurable distance of assassina-
tion¹. I also observed that while some Greek books
were translated directly into Arabic for the Caliphs of
Baghdád, in many cases there was an intermediate
translation into Syriac. So in the "latest revival," which
took place at Cairo a thousand years later, we learn²
that one of the most skilful translators, Ḩunayn or
Yuhanná 'Anhúrí (whom we may well entitle the second
Ḥunayn or Johannitius), "was weak in French but well
grounded in Italian, from which he used to translate
into Arabic. So when the book was written in French
it was first translated for him into Italian, from which
he translated it into Arabic." Whether made directly
or indirectly from the original, the first Arabic transla-
tion before it went to press commonly passed through
the hands of an editor or "corrector" (quite distinct
from the reader of the press) who was a good Arabic
scholar, knowing something of the science in question
and its terminology, but ignorant of any European
language, and who gave the book a proper literary form.
A similar procedure, according to Dr Lucien Leclerc,
characterized the translation of Arabic scientific books
into Latin in the Middle Ages³.

How aptly does Abu 'l-'Alá al-Maʻarrí liken time to
a long poem, in which the rhyme, metre and rhythm
never vary, though the same rhyming word is never
repeated.

¹ See his *Aperçu général sur l'Égypte*, vol. ii, p. 415 (Paris, 1840).

² p. 190 of Zaydán's work mentioned in the last note but one.

³ *Histoire de la Médecine Arabe*, vol. ii, pp. 344 and 345.

LECTURE IV

THE brief survey of the history and development of Arabian Medicine which I have attempted in the last three lectures, and which I must conclude to-day, has necessarily been somewhat severely limited by considerations of time; and I have been obliged to confine myself for the most part to the period and realms of the ‘Abbásid Caliphs, that is the eighth to the thirteenth centuries of our era, and the regions of Mesopotamia and Persia. I regret that I am compelled to exclude from this survey the brilliant civilization developed in Spain and the West under Arab dominion; but, lest you should forget it, or think that I have forgotten it, I must at least mention a few of the most illustrious names associated with Moorish Medicine. In the tenth century Cordova produced the greatest surgeon of the Arab race, Abu’l-Qásim az-Zahráwí, known to medieval Europe as Abulcasis (or even Albucasis) and Alsaharavius, with whom was contemporary the court-physician Ibn Juljul, whose *Lives of the Physicians and Philosophers* is unhappily lost. “Aben Guefit,” properly Ibnu’l-Wáfid, of Toledo, and Ibnu’l-Jazzár of Qayruwán in Tunisia, who sought relaxation from his professional labours in piracy on the high seas, belong to a slightly later generation. The twelfth century produced the famous Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordova, who was, however, more notable as a philosopher than as a physician; Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr) of Seville; and the famous Jewish scholar Maimonides (Músá ibn Maymún), also of Cordova, who finally became court-physician to Saladdin in Egypt. One other name of the thirteenth century which must on no account be omitted is the great botanist Ibnu’l-

B. A. M.

7

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Baytár of Malaga, a worthy successor of Dioscorides, who travelled widely through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt in search of medicinal herbs, and whose works on Materia Medica have been made known in Europe by Sontheimer and Leclerc. In the transmission of the Arabian system of Medicine to Europe, Spain and N.W. Africa, as you are well aware, played the chief part; and in particular Toledo, where men like Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot¹ sought the knowledge which they afterwards conveyed to Christian Europe.

Turning now once more to Persia, the twelfth century is remarkable for the development of a vernacular medical and scientific literature of which only scanty traces are found in earlier times. Arabic, still the chief vehicle of theological and philosophical thought throughout the lands of Islám, as Latin was in medieval Europe, had hitherto been used almost exclusively even by the great Persian physicians Rhazes, Haly Abbas and Avicenna of whom I have spoken. But in the early part of the twelfth century there came to the court of Khwárazm or Khiva a physician named Zaynu'd-Dín Isma'il of Jurján (Hyrcania), who wrote several medical works, of which the most important and by far the largest is entitled, in honour of the ruler to whom it was dedicated, *Dhakhíra-i-Khwárazmsháhí*, or the "Thesaurus" of the King of Khwárazm. This work, which rivals if it does not exceed in scope and size the *Qánún* of Avicenna, remains unpublished, though I believe that a lithographed Urdú translation is still in use in India. I possess, besides several isolated volumes, some transcribed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, one

¹ The period at which Gerard of Cremona (b. 1114, d. 1187) visited Toledo is uncertain. Michael Scot was there in 1217.

Persian Medical Literature

99

complete manuscript of this encyclopaedic work comprising 1403 pages measuring 12×8 inches and each comprising 27 lines. The book cannot contain much fewer than 450,000 words; and as the writing is by no means clear, the text far from correct, and there are, of course, neither head-lines nor indexes, it will be easily understood that the perusal of it is somewhat laborious. It is, however, elaborately divided and subdivided, primarily into nine volumes, with a tenth supplementary volume on Materia Medica, and secondarily into innumerable Discourses (Guftár), Parts (Juz') and Chapters (Báb), of which, with the help of another almost complete manuscript belonging to the Cambridge University Library, I have succeeded in making an exhaustive table. I may note that the Library of this College possesses a very fine old twelfth century manuscript¹ of part of the sixth volume, which treats of local diseases *a capite ad calcem*, including all six chapters of the eighth Discourse on diseases of the heart, and part of the thirteenth Discourse dealing with dropsy.

The same author composed several smaller medical works, all in Persian, namely the “Aims of Medicine” (*Aghrád-i-Tibb*), the “Remembrancer” (*Yádgár*) on Materia Medica and Pharmacy, and the *Khuffí-i-’Aláí* written in two elongated volumes to be carried by the traveller one in each of his riding-boots (*khuff*), whence its name. All these are described by Fonahn in his useful work *Zur Quellenkunde der Persischen Medizin*, and all are recommended by the author of the “Four Discourses” (*Chahár Maqála*), written only twenty years after the death of Zaynu’d-Dín Isma’il. Of the “Thesaurus,” by which term I shall henceforth denote the *Dhakhíra-i-Khwárazmsháhí*, I shall have a good deal

¹ Marked A. 27.

7-2

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more to say, but first I will complete my literary survey
down to the Mongol period, beyond which I do not
propose to go.

The thirteenth century is remarkable for the number
of excellent biographical works in Arabic which it pro-
duced. First, as containing only medical biographies,
I will mention the ‘Uyūnū’l-Anbā fī Ṭabaqātī’l-Atibbā
(“Sources of Information on the Classes of Physicians”),
compiled by Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a at Damascus in A.D. 1245,
and printed at Cairo in two volumes in 1882. Then
there is the Ta’rīkhu’l-Ḥukamā, a biographical dic-
tionary of philosophers and physicians composed by
al-Qiftī, a native of Upper Egypt, a great lover and
collector of books, who combined piety with tolerance
and was generous in his help to other scholars, and who
died at the age of 76 in A.D. 1248. The text of this
valuable work, edited by Dr Julius Lippert, was pub-
lished at Leipzig in 1903. Another similar but rather
earlier work by Shahrazūrī exists in two recensions, one
Arabic and one Persian, but is rare and remains un-
published. The great biographical dictionary of Ibn
Khallikān, begun in Cairo in A.D. 1256 and finished in
the same city in A.D. 1274, is accessible to the English
reader in the translation of the Baron McGuckin de
Slane, and, though more general in its scope, contains
the lives of several physicians of note. The geographer
Yāqút, who flourished about the same time, also wrote a
biographical dictionary, of which five volumes have been
edited by Professor Margoliouth, but this deals chiefly
with men of letters. Lastly, mention must be made of
the Christian physician, philosopher, theologian and
historian, Abu’l-Faraj Gregorius, better known as Bar
Hebraeus, who died at the age of 60 in A.D. 1286, and

Medieval Muslim Hospitals

101

whom the late Dr Wright¹ has described as “one of the most learned and versatile men that Syria ever produced.” He wrote chiefly in Syriac, but at the end of his life, at the request of some Muslim friends at Marágha in N.W. Persia, he produced an Arabic recension of the first or political portion of his great Universal History “enriched with many references to Muhammadan writers and literature which are wanting in the Syriac” original. Being himself a physician of note, enjoying in a high degree the favour and confidence of the Mongol rulers of Persia, he naturally devotes a good deal of attention in his history to medical matters. This book was edited with a Latin translation by Pocock in A.D. 1663, and another excellent edition with full indexes was published by the Catholic Press at Beyrout in A.D. 1890.

What we chiefly lack in order to form a picture of the practice of Medicine in the lands of Islám during the Middle Ages is some account of the actual administration of the hospitals founded in considerable numbers in the more important towns by pious benefactors. About the actual buildings, indeed, we find information in the narratives of travellers like Ibn Batúta (fourteenth century) and the descriptions of topographers like al-Maqrízí (fifteenth century), who gives particulars as to the history, situation and structure of five hospitals in Cairo². The oldest of these was that founded by Aḥmad ibn Túlún about A.D. 873; the most important that founded by Qalá’ún about A.D. 1284 and called “the great hospital of al-Manṣúr” (al-Máristán al-Kabír al-Manṣúrí). It was founded by Qalá’ún

¹ *Syriac Literature* (London, 1894), p. 265. For a list of his medical works, see p. 252 of the same.

² *Khitat* (Buláq, 1853), vol. ii, pp. 405–8. See also E. W. Lane’s *Cairo Fifty Years Ago* (London, 1896), pp. 92–4.

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al-Malik al-Manṣúr in fulfilment of a vow which he made some years earlier when he was cured of a severe attack of colic at Damascus by physicians attached to the hospital founded in that city by Núru'd-Dín, under whom the great Saladdin first served. The endowments amounted to a million dirhams annually; it was open to all sick persons, rich or poor, male or female, and contained wards for women as well as men, and female as well as male attendants were appointed for the care of the patients. One large ward was set apart for fevers, one for ophthalmic cases, one for surgical cases and one for dysentery and kindred ailments. There were also kitchens, lecture-rooms, store-rooms for drugs and apparatus, a dispensary, and rooms for the medical officers. It is worth noting that the word *Máristán*, used throughout these books for a hospital, is a corruption of the Persian word *Bímáristán*, which signifies in that language “a place for the sick.” It has now been replaced in Egypt by the purely Arabic word *Mustashfá*, meaning “a place where health is sought,” while *Máristán* has come to be used in the sense of a mad-house. From the first certain chambers or cells were set apart in these hospitals for lunatics, and Maqrízí tells us how Ahmad ibn Túlún, the founder of the oldest hospital in Cairo, used to visit it daily until a lunatic begged a pomegranate of him, and then, instead of eating it, threw it at him with such violence that it burst and spoiled his clothes, after which he would never again visit the hospital. Lane, in his *Cairo Fifty Years Ago* (pp. 92-4), gives a pitiful account of the lunatics he saw in the Bímáristán of Qalá'ún when he visited it; while Clot Bey, in his *Aperçu général sur l'Égypte*¹, draws a deplorable picture of the state of

¹ Paris, 1840, vol. ii, pp. 382 et seqq.

Rashidu'd-Dín, Physician and Statesman 103

Medicine in that country at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century.

A very valuable, I believe unique, Persian manu-
script which I recently acquired from the library of the
late Sir Albert Houtum-Schindler, who during his long
residence in Persia had gained more knowledge of that
country in all its aspects than anyone now living
possesses, throws some light incidentally on the state of
Medicine there in the early fourteenth century. One of
the most learned men and scholarly writers of that period
was the physician Rashidu'd-Dín Fadlu'lláh, born in A.D.
1247 at Hamadán, where Avicenna is buried. He be-
came court-physician to the Mongol ruler Abáqá, whose
successor Gházán, a convert to Islám, formed so high
an opinion of him that he appointed him Prime Minister
in A.D. 1295. During the twenty-two years for which
he held this high and perilous post (for it was quite
exceptional for the Minister of a Mongol sovereign to
die a natural death) he enjoyed enormous wealth and
power, which he used in the most beneficent manner for
the foundation of colleges, hospitals and libraries, the
endowment of learning, and the encouragement of
scholars. On the beautiful quarter which he founded
at Tabriz and named after himself Rab'-i-Rashidí he
lavished endless care, not only adorning it with noble
buildings consecrated to pious and learned uses, but
drawing thither by his bounty the greatest scholars, the
most eminent professional men, and the most skilful
artisans of the time from all parts of the world. The
extraordinary and minute precautions which he took to
perpetuate and diffuse the learning stored in the in-
comparable libraries of the Rab'-i-Rashidí are fully
detailed by Quatremère in the Introduction to his
Histoire des Mongols. Alas, that these precautions in

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the event proved vain, for when, in July 1318, he finally
fell a victim to the intrigues of envious rivals and was
put to death, the beautiful suburb on which he had
lavished so much thought, care and wealth was utterly
wrecked and plundered!

Such in brief was the man who at the height of his
power preferred to call himself "Rashid the physician"
rather than indulge in the high-sounding titles of a grandi-
loquent age; and the manuscript of which I have spoken
contains a collection of some fifty of his letters, addressed
to many different people on many different subjects,
collected and arranged by his secretary Muhammad of
Abarqúh. My friend Muhammad Shafi', now Professor of
Arabic at the Oriental College, Lahore, was good enough
to make an abstract of this precious volume, condensing
or omitting the precepts and platitudes with which many
of the letters are filled, but devoting particular attention
to those which contain matters of interest, and especially
of medical or pharmaceutical interest. These, ten in
number, I propose briefly to discuss, taking them in the
order in which they occur in the manuscript.

No. 18 (ff. 34b–36b), addressed to Khwája ‘Alá’u’d-Dín Hindú, demanding various oils for the hospital in the *Rab’-i-Rashídí* at Tabríz, where, according to the report of the physician in charge, Muḥammad ibn ú-Nílí, who is described as the “Galen of our times,” they were urgently needed. The quantity of each oil required (varying from 1 to 300 maunds) and the place from which it is to be obtained are carefully specified. Shíráz is to supply six different kinds; Başra, seven; Asia Minor, six; Baghdád, nine; Syria, three; and Ḩilla, three. Most of them are aromatic oils prepared from various fragrant flowers, violets, jessamine, narcissus, roses of different sorts, myrtle, orange-blossoms and

Letters of Rashid the Physician

105

the like, but we find also absinth, mastic, camomile,
castor oil, and even oil of scorpions. In a post-script
the writer urges speed in the fulfilment of these com-
missions, and orders that, to save delay, a separate
messenger is to be sent to each of the six localities
indicated.

No. 19 (ff. 36 b–40 a), addressed by Rashid to his
son Amír ‘Alí, governor of Baghdad, instructing him
as to pensions and presents to be given to learned
men throughout the Persian Empire from the Oxus to
the Jamna and as far west as Asia Minor and the
Egyptian frontiers. The presents in each case consist
of a sum of money, a fur cloak or pelisse, and a beast
for riding. Only one of the 49 persons named is
specifically described as a physician, namely one Maḥmúd
ibn Ilyás¹, who is to receive 1000 dínárs in cash, a cloak
of grey squirrel, and a horse or mule with saddle.

No. 21 (ff. 45 b–53 b), addressed by Rashid to his
son Jalálu’d-Dín, governor of Asia Minor, requesting
him to send every year to Tabriz for use in the
hospital quantities varying from 50 to 100 maunds of
six drugs, namely, anise-seed, agaric, mastic, lavender,
dodder and wormwood.

No. 29 (ff. 87 b–92 a). This letter was written from
Multán in Sind to Mawláná Quṭbu'd-Dín of Shíráz.
The writer complains that he had been compelled to
abandon his pleasant life in Persia and undertake a
troublesome journey to India at the whim of Arghún
the Mongol, who wished him to impress on the Indian
kings and princes the power and greatness of his master,
and at the same time to collect certain useful drugs not
to be found in Persia. He expresses satisfaction at the
success of his mission and his approaching return home

¹ See No. 41 *infra*.

NB

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and incidentally describes how he succeeded without offending Sultan 'Alá'u'd-Dín, to whom he was accredited, in remonstrating with him on his excessive indulgence in wine, the remonstrance being rendered so palatable by an entertaining anecdote and some appropriate verses that his royal host, instead of being annoyed, assigned to him and his son after him a handsome pension.

No. 36 (ff. 120b-131b) is a very long letter, written when Rashid was suffering from what he believed to be a mortal illness, containing elaborate instructions about the disposal of his property and the maintenance of his foundations. He gives some particulars of the library which he had bequeathed to the *Rab'-i-Rashidí*, comprising 1000 *Quráns*, many of them written by the most famous calligraphists, and 60,000 other manuscripts, scientific and literary, including books brought from India and China. He also makes special mention of 1000 Chinese syrup-jars, very artistically made, each bearing the name of the syrup for which it was intended, and Chinese boxes for electuaries.

No. 40 (ff. 136a-138b), though not concerned with medicine, is interesting as showing the solidarity of the Muslim world, the rapidity with which ideas permeated it, even to the remotest parts, and the immense stimulus to learning which one generous patron could give, even in lands not politically connected with his own. It contains Rashid's instructions to one of his agents in Asia Minor as to the adequate remuneration in money and presents of the learned men in the Maghrib, or western lands of Islám, who had written books in his honour. Of these ten, six were resident in Cordova, Seville and other parts of Andalusia, and four in Tunis, Tripoli and Qayruwán. We

107

flatter ourselves on the facilities of communication existing in these our days, but it is questionable whether an idea, a book, or a philosophical doctrine would travel so quickly now from Tunis to Tabriz or from Seville to Samarqand as it did in the fourteenth century. So potent was the unifying effect of Islám and its universal medium the Arabic language!

**No. 41** (ff. 138 b–140 b) concerns the reconstruction and re-endowment of a hospital at Shíráz, which, originally founded by the Atábeks of Fárs a century earlier, had for some time fallen into decay. Rashid now appoints a new physician, Mahmúd ibn Ilyás¹, who had attracted his favourable notice by a medical work entitled *Lata’if-i-Rashidیyya* composed in his honour. I do not know whether this book is still extant, but Fonahn² mentions another, entitled *Tuḥfatu’l-Ḥukamá* (the “Physicians’ Gift”), by the same author, of which there is a manuscript in the *Núr-i-‘Uthmániyya* Library at Constantinople. To this physician are hereby assigned a yearly salary and handsome gifts payable from the local revenues, and he is placed in control of the hospital and all its endowments.

**No. 42** (ff. 141 a–142 b) is entirely concerned with the hospital at Hamadán (Rashid’s native city), which had also fallen into an unsatisfactory state through misappropriation of its revenues. A new physician, Ibn Mahdí, is appointed to take charge of the hospital and reorganize it with more regard to the welfare of the patients and the supply of the necessary drugs and medicaments, amongst which special mention is made of several not easily procured, such as Terra sigillata (*tín-i-makhtúm*), Oil of balsam (*rawghan-i-balsán*),

¹ See **No. 19** *supra*.

² *Zur Quellenkunde d. Pers. Medizin*, p. 124.

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Folia Indica or Malabathrum (sádhaj-i-hindí), and
Theban electuary (tiryáq-i-fárúq). Arrangements are
also proposed for the proper ordering of the accounts,
and the physician, after attending to all these matters,
and appointing a dispenser, a dresser, a cook and other
officers, is instructed to return to Tabríz, where further
favours await him. This letter is one of the few which
is dated: it was written from Caesarea (Qayşariyya) in
A.H. 690 (A.D. 1291).

No. 47 (ff. 151a-156b) is a letter written from
India by Malik 'Alá'u'd-Dín to Rashíd, complimenting
him on his public spirit and services to humanity, and
containing a long list of presents forwarded to him by the
port of Başra. These presents are arranged in twelve
categories, viz. (1) wearing apparel, (2) precious stones,
(3) perfumes, (4) rare animals, (5) conserves, (6) drugs
and simples, (7) a lotion for removing freckles, placed
in a class by itself, (8) upholstery, (9) aromatic oils,
(10) plate and china, (11) spices and dried fruits, and
(12) rare woods and ivory. The list of drugs is the
longest and contains 22 items, including cinnamon,
nutmeg, cloves, cardamoms, cubebs, cassia, fumitory
and betel-nuts.

No. 51 (ff. 171b-175b). From Rashid to his son Sa'du'd-Dín, governor of Qinnasrín and the 'Awāsim in Asia Minor, describing the concourse of scholars attracted to Tabriz by his bounty and the splendours of the suburb of Rab'-i-Rashidí, on which he has lavished so much care and money. It contained 24 caravanserais, 1500 workshops, and 30,000 beautiful houses, besides gardens, baths, shops, mills, weaving and dyeing establishments, paper factories, and a mint. The inhabitants had been carefully chosen from various cities and countries. There were 200 professional Qur'ān-

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The Rab'-i-Rashidí

109

readers with fixed salaries to read the scripture daily in the chapel appointed for that purpose and to train forty selected acolytes. There was a Scholars' Street (Kúcha-i-ulamá), where dwelt 400 divines, jurisconsults and traditionists, with suitable salaries and allowances, and in the neighbouring students' quarters lived 1000 eager students from various Muslim countries whose studies were subsidized and directed according to their aptitudes. Fifty skilful physicians had been attracted thither from India, China, Egypt, Syria and other countries, to each of whom were assigned ten enthusiastic students with definite duties in the hospital, to which were also attached surgeons, oculists and bone-setters, each of whom had the charge of five students. All these dwelt in the Street of the Healers (Kúcha-i-mu'áliján) at the back of the hospital, near the gardens and orchards of Rashidábád.

I have now completed what I have to say about the history and literature of the so-called Arabian Medicine within the restricted limits imposed on me by considerations of space and time, and I propose now to say a few words about the system itself, with special reference to the Kámilu's-Ṣiná'at, or "Liber Regius," of al-Majúsí, the Qánún of Avicenna, and especially the Persian "Thesaurus" of Khwárazmsháh, which is accessible only in manuscript. All these three are systematic treatises dealing with the whole science and art of Medicine as understood by the medieval Muslim world. The "Liber Regius" is the simplest in its arrangement, consisting of two volumes each containing ten Discourses (Maqála), the first ten dealing with the theory and the second ten with the practice of Medicine; and its Latin translation, printed at Lyons in 1523, is the best and most adequate of these translations which

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I have met with. The other two books suffer from the common Oriental fault of exaggerated and over-elaborate subdivision. Ignoring these, the contents of the ten books (i.e. nine books and a supplement) which constitute the “Thesaurus” are briefly as follows:

**Book I**, comprising 6 Discourses and 77 chapters, treats of the definition, scope and utility of Medicine; of the Natures, Elements, Complexions or Temperaments and Humours; of Anatomy, general and special; and of the three-fold Functions or Powers of the body, natural, animal and psychical.

**Book II**, comprising 9 Discourses and 151 chapters, treats of health and disease (including General Pathology, classification and nomenclature); signs and symptoms, especially the pulse and the excretions; aetiology; Embryology and Obstetric Medicine and the growth and care of the child; the emotions; and Life and Death.

**Book III**, comprising 14 Discourses and 204 chapters, treats of Hygiene, including the effects of climate, season, air, water, food and drink of all kinds, especially wine; sleeping, waking, movement and rest; clothing and perfumes; bleeding, purging and emetics; dyscrasia; mental states and their effects on the body; the prodromata of disease; and the care of children, the aged and travellers.

**Book IV**, comprising 4 Discourses and 25 chapters, treats of the importance and principles of diagnosis, and of coction, crisis and prognosis.

**Book V**, comprising 6 Discourses and 80 chapters, treats of the varieties, aetiology, symptoms and treatment of Fever, the first four Discourses being chiefly devoted to malarial fevers, the fifth to small-pox and measles, and the sixth to recurrence, prophylaxis, diet, and the treatment of convalescents.

The Thesaurus of Khwárazmsháh

III

**Book VI**, comprising 21 Discourses and 434 chapters, treats of local diseases *a capite ad calcem*, including mental affections, epilepsy, apoplexy, paralysis, tetanus, dropsy, gynaecology, obstetrics, gout, rheumatism, sciatica and elephantiasis.

**Book VII**, comprising 7 Discourses and 55 chapters, treats of general pathological conditions which may affect any organ, including tumours, abscesses, cancer, wounds, fractures and dislocations, and contains a Discourse of 12 chapters on the use of the actual cautery.

**Book VIII**, comprising 3 Discourses and 37 chapters, treats of personal cleanliness and the care of the hair, nails and complexion.

**Book IX**, comprising 5 Discourses and 44 chapters, treats of poisons, animal, vegetable, and mineral; and of the bites and stings of beasts, snakes and venomous reptiles and insects.

Here this immense work, comprising 9 Books, 75 Discourses, and 1107 chapters, originally ended with the colophon: "*Here endeth the Book of Poisons, with the conclusion of which endeth the Work entitled the Thesaurus of Khwárazmsháh, by the Favour of God and His Help,>*" but there follow three final sections of apology, the first for delay in completing the book, the second for its defects, and the third for all physicians who themselves fall victims to the diseases they treat¹.

Subsequently the author added a Conclusion, or tenth Book, on Materia Medica, divided into three parts, the first dealing with animal products, the second with simple vegetable drugs, and the third with compound medicaments.

¹ Cf. the Arabic verses on pp. 8 and 9 *supra*, and the foot-note on p. 59.

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At this point we may pause to consider two questions which have been constantly present in my mind during the preparation of these lectures. The first question is, how far can the fuller study of Arabian Medicine be regarded as likely to repay the labour it involves? The second question is, supposing it to be worth fuller study, how should that study be pursued in the future, and what parts of the subject most merit attention?

From the narrowest utilitarian point of view it is not likely that even the profoundest study of the subject will yield any practical results of importance, seeing that the whole system is based on a rudimentary Anatomy, an obsolete Physiology, and a fantastic Pathology. From the Arabian Materia Medica and from the rules of Diet and Hygiene some hints might possibly be gleaned; but with this exception we must, I fear, admit that little practical advantage can be hoped for. Few educated people, however, and certainly no one in the distinguished audience I have the honour of addressing, will take this narrow, purely utilitarian view, of which, indeed, the very existence of the Fitz-Patrick Lectures is a negation. That the Embryology of Science, the evolution of our present *Weltanschauung*, is a proper and even a noble subject of research we shall all readily admit; but still the question remains whether the Arabs did more than transmit the wisdom of the Greeks, and whether they added much original matter to the scientific concepts of which for some eight centuries they were the chief custodians. This, unfortunately, is not an easy question to answer, and much laborious research will be needed ere it can be answered definitely. For such research, moreover, a combination of qualifications not very commonly met with in one

Inadequacy of the Latin Translations

113

individual is required, to wit, a scholarly knowledge of
Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Persian, and, if
possible, Sanskrit; a knowledge of, or at least an
interest in Medicine; abundant leisure; voracious and
omnivorous reading; and great enthusiasm and industry.
And it must be said once and for all that no just idea
of Arabian Medicine can be derived from the very im-
perfect Latin renderings of the standard Arabic works.
I gave one example in a previous lecture of the un-
intelligible transcription of Arabic words, evidently not
understood, into Latin, and I will now give another.
In the Latin translation of the *Qánún* of Avicenna
printed at Venice in 1544, on f. 198 a you will find,
under diseases of the head and brain, a section entitled
“*Sermo universalis de Karabito qui est apostema capitis
sirsem.*” If you refer to the corresponding passage of
the Arabic text (p. 302) printed at Rome in 1593, you
will find this mysterious disease appearing as *qaránítus*
(قرانیط). But the true reading, given in a fine old MS.
which I recently acquired, is *farránítis* (فرانیط), that
is *φρενîtis*, frensy. Such is the havoc wrought in
Arabic letters by the misplacement of dots and dia-
critical points, and in the case of these unfamiliar Greek
words there is nothing to guide the Arabian scribe if the
word be indistinctly written, one form appearing as intelli-
gible or as unintelligible as another. Hence the student
of Arabic medical literature must begin by correcting and
re-editing even the printed texts before he can begin to
read or translate them; and the numerous important
books which exist only in manuscript will, of course,
give him still more trouble, since to consult what still
survives of the *Hâwî* or “Continens” of Râzî—the
most important as well as the most voluminous Arabic
work on Medicine—he will have to visit not only the

B. A. M.

8

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British Museum and the Bodleian Libraries, but Munich and the Escorial, and even then he will not have seen half of this great work. Nor is there much hope that critical editions of these books will ever be published unless Egyptian medical students or young Indian scholars with a taste for research and a desire to render service to the renown of Islamic science can be stimulated by material and moral support to undertake this laborious and unremunerative but important work. As an example of what may be done by such workers, I desire to call attention to Mawlawi 'Azímu'd-Dín 'Aḥmad's admirable *Catalogue of the Arabic Medical Works in the Oriental Public Library at Bankipore* (Calcutta, 1910), a fine and scholarly piece of work carried out at the instigation and under the supervision of Sir E. Denison Ross, at that time Director of the Muhammadan Madrasa at Calcutta, but now of the London School of Oriental Studies.

Apart from new elements, not of Greek origin, which may be disclosed by a more minute and attentive study of Arabian Medicine, there is the practical certainty that the seven books of Galen's *Anatomy*, lost in the original, but preserved in an Arabic translation and published with a German translation by Dr Max Simon in 1906, are not the only ancient medical works of which the substance if not the form may be recovered in this way. And we must further remember that the Arab translators, who were at work nearly 1200 years ago, were in contact with a living tradition which went back from Baghdad to Jundi-Shápúr, thence to Edessa and Antioch, and thence to Alexandria; and that this tradition may well serve to elucidate many obscure points in the Greek texts still preserved to us. Finally the clinical observations (embodied especially in

Characteristics of Medieval Science

115

the works of Rází) have an intrinsic value of their own
which would undoubtedly repay investigation. On all
these grounds, then, even if we rate the originality of
Arabian Medicine at the lowest, I venture to think that
it well deserves more careful and systematic study.

In considering medieval science as a whole we
cannot fail to be struck by two peculiarities which it
presents, the solidarity and interdependence of all its
branches, and the dominance of certain numbers in its
basic conceptions. The sum of knowledge was not then
so immense as to defy comprehension by one individual,
and it is seldom that we find a medieval physician
content to confine his attention exclusively to the medical
sciences, or unwilling to include in his studies astronomy
and astrology, music and mathematics, and even ethics,
metaphysics and politics. It is said in the *Qur'án*
(xli, 53): "We will show them *Our signs in the*
*horizon and in themselves,***" and this has encouraged
many of the mystically-minded amongst the Muslims to
seek for correspondences not only between stars, plants,
bodies and the like, but between the material and spiritual
worlds. The strange sect of the Isma'ilís or Esoterics
(*Bátiniyya*), out of which were developed the notorious
Assassins, instructed their missionaries to arouse the
curiosity of the potential proselyte by such questions as
"Why has a man seven cervical and twelve dorsal verte-
brae?" "Why has each of the fingers three joints, but the
thumb only two?" and the like; and it was to them a fact
of infinite significance that the number of joints on the two
hands agreed with the number of permanent teeth, the
number of days in the lunar month, and the number of
letters in the Arabic alphabet. So in their cosmogony we
notice the great part played by the numbers four, seven

8-2

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and twelve. Thus we have the four Natural Properties, Heat, Cold, Dryness and Moisture; the four Elements; the four Seasons; the four Humours; the four Winds, and the like. Also the seven Planets, the seven Climes, the seven Days of the Week, and the seven Seas; the twelve Signs of the Zodiac, the twelve Months of the Year, and so on.

According to the conception of the oldest Arabian physicians, it is the four Natural Properties rather than what are commonly called the four Elements which are really elemental. This is very plainly stated by 'Ali ibn Rabban at-Tabarí in the third chapter of his "Paradise of Wisdom," where he says:

> "The simple Natures called elemental are four, two active, to wit, Heat and Cold, and two passive, to wit, Moisture and Dryness. And the Compound Natures also are four, and the fact that they are called 'compound' shows that the simple ones precede them, since the compound originates from the simple. Of these Compound Natures the first is Fire, which is hot, dry, light, and centrifugal in movement; the second Air, which is hot, moist and light, moving or blowing in every direction; the third Water, which is cold, moist, heavy, and centripetal in movement; and the fourth Earth, which is cold, dry and heavy, and moves ever towards the lowest.... All earthly substances are subordinate to the Fire, and are affected and changed by it. And the Natural Properties are four, because the Agent becomes active only through the Object on which it acts. The two active Natural Principles are Heat and Cold, whereof each has its own proper object, whence the Four."

"These Natures," continues our author in the next chapter, "are mutually hostile and antagonistic, and

Doctrine of Correspondences

117

most violently so when this antagonism arises simul-
taneously from two sides or aspects; as, for instance,
in the case of Fire, which is antagonistic both by its
Heat and Dryness to the Cold and Moisture of Water;
or Air, which is antagonistic both by its Heat and
Moisture to the Cold and Dryness of Earth. But if
the antagonism be on one side only, it is less pronounced,
as, for instance, in the case of Air, which is opposed to
Water by its Heat, but agrees with it in its Moisture.
Therefore hath God made the Air a barrier between
the Water and the Fire, and the Water a barrier between
the Earth and the Air."

Here follows a diagram which may be further
amplified from the *Kitābu't-tanbīh* ("Livre d'Aver-
tissement")¹ of the great historian and geographer
Mas‘údí, who wrote in the middle of the tenth century
of our era. In this diagram Heat opposed to Cold and
Dryness opposed to Moisture constitute the four cardinal
points. Compounded of Heat and Dryness on the
different Planes or orders of Phenomena are Fire of the
Four Elements, Summer of the Four Seasons, the
South of the Four Regions, Youth of the Four Ages
of Man, and the Yellow Bile of the Four Humours.
Similarly from Dryness and Cold we have Earth,
Autumn, the West, the Mature Age, and the Black Bile;
from Cold and Moisture, Water, Winter, the North,
Old Age and the Phlegm; and from Heat and Moisture,
Air, Spring, the East, Childhood and the Blood.

The Universe or Macrocosm, according to this con-
ception, comprises the Earth or Terrestrial Sphere

¹ The Arabic text, printed at Leyden in 1894, constitutes vol. viii of the late Professor de Goeje's *Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum*. The French translation by Carra de Vaux was published in Paris in 1896 under the title *Le Livre de l'Avertissement et de la Revision*.

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surrounded by twelve concentric enveloping spheres, namely, the Aqueous, Aerial and Igneous Spheres, the Seven Planetary Spheres, beginning with that of the Moon and ending with that of Saturn, the Zodiacal Sphere or Sphere of the Fixed Stars, and outside all the *Falaku'l-Aflák* ("the Heaven of the Heavens") or *al-Falaku'l-Atlas* ("the Plain," or Starless, "Heaven"), the Empyrean of Ptolemy, beyond which, according to the common opinion, is *al-Khalá*, "the Vacuum," or *Lá Khalá wa lá Malá*, "neither Vacuum nor Plenum." The generation of terrestrial existences is supposed to have been brought about by the interaction of the Seven Planets, or "Seven Celestial Sires," and the Four Elements, or "Four Terrestrial Mothers," from which resulted the "Threefold Progeny," or the Mineral, Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms. The first of these was produced in the interspace between the Terrestrial and the Aqueous Spheres, the second between the Aqueous and Aerial Spheres, and the third between the Aerial and Igneous Spheres. The process of Evolution from Mineral to Plant, from Plant to Animal and from Animal to Man is clearly recognized, and is fully discussed by Dieterici in the ninth book of his exposition of Arabian Philosophy, as taught by the encyclopaedists of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, entitled *Der Darwinismus im zehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhundert*¹. In the twelfth-century Persian work entitled the "Four Discourses," which I have already had occasion to cite, attempts are even made to identify the "missing links," coral being regarded as intermediate between the mineral and vegetable kingdoms; the vine, which seeks to avoid and escape from the fatal embrace of a kind of bind-weed called 'ashaqa, as intermediate

¹ Leipzig, 1878.

Principles of Arabian Medicine

119

between the vegetable and animal kingdoms; and the
nasnás, a kind of ape or wild man, as intermediate be-
tween man and the beasts.

The general principles which constitute the basis of
Arabian Medicine are the outcome of these conceptions,
and the opening chapters of every great systematic work
on the subject deal largely with the doctrine of the
“Temperaments” or “Complexions” (*Mizáj*, plural *Am-
zija*), the Natural Properties (*Ṭabáyi*'), and the Humours
(*Akhlát*). *Mizáj*, which is still the common word for
health in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, is derived from
a root meaning “to mix,” and indicates a state of equi-
librium between the four Natural Properties or the
four Humours; while if this equilibrium is upset by the
preponderance of one of the Natural Properties or the
Humours, a disturbance entitled *Inhiráfu'l-Mizáj*, or
“Deflection of the temperamental equilibrium,” is pro-
duced. But even the normal healthy *Mizáj* is not
practically a constant quantity, each region, season, age,
individual and organ having its own special and appro-
priate type. Nine types of Complexion are recognized,
namely the equable (*mu'tadil*), which is practically non-
existent; the four simple Complexions, hot, cold, dry and
moist; and the four compound, namely the hot and dry,
the hot and moist, the cold and dry, and the cold and
moist. Excluding the rare case of a perfect equilibrium,
every individual will be either of the Bilious Complexion,
which is hot and dry; the Atrabilious or Melancholic,
which is cold and dry; the Phlegmatic, which is cold
and moist; or the Sanguine, which is hot and moist.
In treating a hot, cold, dry or moist disease with a food
or drug of the opposite quality, regard must be paid to
these idiosyncrasies. The Natural Property inherent
in each food or drug exists in one of four degrees. Thus,

NB

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for example, such a substance if hot in the first degree is a food; if hot in the second degree, both a food and a medicine; if hot in the third degree, a medicine, not a food; if hot in the fourth degree, a poison. Another four-fold division of substances which react on the human body is into those which act beneficially both internally and externally, like wheat, which in the stomach is a food and externally a poultice to "ripen" wounds or sores; those which are beneficial internally but mischievous externally, like garlic, which, taken internally, increases the natural Heat, but applied externally acts as a poison; those which are poisons internally but antidotes externally, like Litharge (*Murdásang*) and Verdigris or Acetate of Copper (*Zangár*); and lastly those which both externally and internally act as poisons, like Aconite (*Bísh*) and Ergot (*Qurún-i-Sunbul*).

The third Discourse (*Guftár*) of the First Book of the "Thesaurus" is devoted to the discussion of the four Humours. It comprises six chapters, four treating in turn of each of the Humours, one (the first) of their nature, and one (the last) of their production and differentiation. The first chapter is so short that it may be translated in full. "Humour," says the author, "is a moisture circulating in the human body and naturally located in the veins and hollow organs, such as the stomach, liver, spleen and gall-bladder; and it is produced from the food. Some Humours are good and some bad. The good are those which nourish man's body and take the place of the fluids which are expended. The bad are those which are useless for this purpose, and these are the Humours of which the body must be cleansed by drugs. The Humours are four, Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile and Black Bile." According to al-Majúsí's "Liber Regius" they are the proximate, or secondary, and

*Theory of the Four Humours*

121

special elements (*ustuquşşát, στοιχεία*) of the bodies of all
warm-blooded animals, as contrasted with the remote,
or primary, and common elements, Earth, Air, Fire and
Water, with which they severally correspond, as already
explained, and from which they arise, being therefore
called the “Daughters of the Elements” (*Banátu'l-
Arkán*).

Stated briefly, the theory of the production and dis-
tribution of the four Humours is as follows. In the
stomach the food undergoes a "first digestion" whereby
the more nutritious part of it is converted into chyle,
called by the Arabs *Kaylús*; but, besides the unnutritious
residue which is rejected, a portion is converted into
Phlegm, which differs from the other three Humours
in having no special location, such as the Blood has in
the liver, the Yellow Bile in the gall-bladder, and the
Black Bile in the spleen. The chyle is conveyed to the
liver by the portal vein, which receives the veins of
the stomach and mesentery, and there it undergoes a
"second digestion" or coction, which divides it into
three portions, a scum or froth which is the Yellow Bile;
a sediment, which is the Black Bile; and the Blood,
which contains its choicest ingredients. The Blood
passes on by the Superior Vena Cava to the heart,
having dismissed its more aqueous part to the kidneys
for excretion, and is thence distributed by the arteries
to the various organs, in which it undergoes a fourth
and final coction or "digestion" (the third having taken
place in the blood-vessels). In the normal body the
Humours exist in a state of mixture, save that a reserve
of Yellow Bile is stored in the gall-bladder and of Black
Bile in the spleen; but the separation and elimination
of any Humour can be effected by appropriate therapeutic
agents, drugs or otherwise. Each Humour may be

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natural and normal, or unnatural and abnormal. The normal Blood is of two kinds, the one dark red and thick, occurring in the liver and veins; the other moister, warmer, more fluid, and of a brighter red, occurring in the heart and arteries. Blood may become abnormal simply through excess of heat or cold, or by admixture with superfluous bilious, atrabilious or phlegmatic matter. Of the Phlegm four abnormal qualities are recognized, the aqueous, the mucous, the vitreous and the calcareous; and of the Yellow Bile the same number.

Here follow, alike in the *Qánún* and the "Thesaurus," the sections dealing with general and special Anatomy, the subject-matter of which is accessible to the general reader in Dr P. de Koning's excellent work *Trois traités d'Anatomie Arabes*. Thanks to him and to Dr Max Simon, this branch of Arabian Medicine has been more thoroughly elucidated than any other, and I may therefore pass on to the sections on the Natural Functions and Virtues, or Faculties, which complete what may be called the General Physiology of the Arabian physicians. These Functions or Virtues are primarily divided into three classes, the Natural, common to the Animal and Vegetable kingdoms; the Animal, peculiar to the Animal kingdom; and the Psychical, some of which are common to man and the higher animals, while others are peculiar to man. The Natural Virtues are the Nutritive and the Reproductive, the first including the Attractive, Retentive, Digestive and Expulsive. The Animal Virtues or Functions are the active, connected with the phenomena of Respiration and Circulation, and the passive, connected with the simpler emotions of Fear, Anger, Disgust, and the like, common to men and animals. The Psychic Virtues or Functions include motor or sensory powers common to all animals, and the

*Theory of Respiration and Circulation*

123

higher mental faculties, Thought, Memory, Imagination
and the like, peculiar to man. Corresponding with the
Five External Senses, Taste, Touch, Hearing, Smelling
and Seeing, are the Five Internal Senses, of which the
first and second, the compound sense (or "Sensus
Communis") and the Imagination, are located in the
anterior ventricle of the brain; the third and fourth,
the Co-ordinating and Emotional Faculties, in the mid-
brain; and the fifth, the Memory, in the hind-brain¹.
Here there exists some confusion between the nomen-\clature adopted by physicians and metaphysicians, which
Avicenna especially emphasizes, impressing on the
former, to whom his *Qánún* is addressed, that their
concern is less with abstract philosophical ideas than
with what lies within the scope of actual practice.

Here I should like to call your attention to a rather
remarkable passage² in the *Kitábu'l-Malikí*, or "Liber
Regius," of 'Alí ibnu'l-'Abbás al-Majúsí, who died in
A.D. 982, about the time when Avicenna was born. This
passage, which occurs in the chapter treating of the
Animal Virtues or Vital Functions, deals chiefly with
the two opposite movements of expansion (*inbisát*) and
contraction (*ingibád*), which in the heart and arteries
constitute diastole and systole, and in the respiratory
organs inspiration and expiration. These movements
are compared to those of a bellows, except that they are
produced by an internal, not by an external, force; and
it is, of course, supposed by the writer that the heart
draws air from the lungs to mix with the blood for the
elaboration of the Vital Spirit, just as the lungs inhale
it from without, and that the "vaporized superfluities"
(*al-fuḍúlu'd-dukhániyya*), or vitiated air, are expelled by

¹ See my *Year amongst the Persians*, pp. 144-5.

² Vol. i, pp. 138-9 of the Cairo edition.

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124

the reverse process. Having concluded his remarks on
Respiration, the author continues as follows:

> "And you must know that during the diastole such of the pulsating vessels (i.e. the arteries) as are near the heart draw in air and sublimated blood from the heart by compulsion of vacuum, because during the systole they are emptied of blood and air, but during the diastole the blood and air return and fill them. Such of them as are near the skin draw air from the outer atmosphere; while such as are intermediate in position between the heart and the skin have the property of drawing from the non-pulsating vessels (i.e. the veins) the finest and most subtle of the blood. This is because in the non-pulsating vessels (i.e. the veins) are pores communicating with the pulsating vessels (i.e. the arteries). The proof of this is that when an artery is cut, all the blood which is in the veins also is evacuated."

Here, as it seems to me, we clearly have a rudimentary conception of the capillary system.

Corresponding with the three categories of Faculties or Virtues are three Spirits, the Natural, the Animal and the Psychical, the first elaborated in the Liver and thence conveyed by the Veins to the Heart; the second elaborated in the Heart and conveyed by the carotid arteries to the Brain, and the third elaborated in the Brain and thence conveyed by the nerves to all parts of the body. These, and their relation one to another, and to the immortal Spirit or Intelligence of which the existence is generally recognized, are but briefly discussed by Avicenna and the other medical writers whom I have chiefly cited. The fullest discussion of these matters, appertaining rather to Philosophy and Psychology than Medicine, I have found in a very rare Arabic work on the generation and development of

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125

man by Abu'l-Ḥasan Sa'id ibn Hibatu'lláh, court-
physician to the Caliph al-Muqtaḍí, who flourished in
the second half of the eleventh century¹. This work
entitled *Maqála fí Khalqí'l-Insán* ("Discourse on the
Creation of Man") deals chiefly with the processes of
Reproduction, Gestation, Parturition, Growth and
Decay, but the last ten of the fifty chapters into which
it is divided deal with Psychology, including arguments
in favour of the survival of Intelligence after Death and
against Metempsychosis. The life of the body, according
to this writer, depends on the Animal Spirit and ends
with its departure "through the channels whereby the
air reaches the Heart," i.e. through the mouth and
nostrils. This conception is embodied in the common
Arabic phrase *Mátª ḫatfª anfi-hi*, "He died a nose-
death," i.e. a natural death, the Animal Spirit escaping
through the nose and not through a wound. So also
we have the common Persian expression *Ján bar lab
ámada*, meaning one whose spirit has reached his lips
and is on the brink of departure.

My allotted hour runs out, and I must conclude this
very inadequate sketch of Arabian Medicine which it
has been my privilege and my pleasure to present to
you. I hope that you may have found in it, if not much
useful instruction, at least a little entertainment. With
great misgiving and some unwillingness I undertook
the task at the instigation of my teacher and friend Sir
Norman Moore, the President of this College, to whose
inspiration I owe so much since my student days in St
Bartholomew's Hospital. I have been amply rewarded
by the task itself, and it shall not be my fault if it is

¹ His life is given by Ibn Abi Uṣaybi'a in his *Classes of Physicians* (vol. i, pp. 254-5 of the Cairo edition).

126

Arabian Medicine. IV

laid aside because its immediate purpose is fulfilled. More remains to be accomplished in this branch of Arabic studies than in any other of equal importance, and much pioneer work is required ere we can hope to reach the ultimate conclusions which are so important for the history of scientific thought throughout the ages. Above all there has grown in me while communing with the minds of these old Arabian and Persian physicians a realization of the solidarity of the human intelligence beyond all limitations of race, space or time, and of the essential nobility of the great profession represented by this College.

INDEX

A hyphen prefixed to a name or word indicates that it should be preceded by the Arabic definite article al-. The prefixes Abú (“father of...”), Ibn (“son of...”), Umm (“mother of...”) in Arabic, and de, le, von in European names, are disregarded in the alphabetical arrangement. Names common to two or more persons mentioned in the text are, to save repetition, grouped under one heading, which, in these cases, is printed in Clarendon type, as are the more important reference numbers. Arabic and Persian words and titles of books are printed in italics. Roman numbers following a name indicate the century of the Christian era in which the person flourished or the book was written.

Abáqá (Mongol Íl-Khán of Persia, xiii),
103

'Abbásid Caliphs (viii-xiii), 2, 5, 14, 17,
23, 25, 57, 91, 97

'Abdu'llah ibn Sawáda (patient of -Rází,
x), 51-2

'Abdu'l-Wahháb of Qazwín (xix), 36

'Abdu'r-Rahmán (vii), 16; — Efendi
Isma'il (Egyptian doctor and writer,
1892), 65

"Aben Guefit," 97. See Ibnu'l-Wáfid
Abgas, anfas (Arabic corruptions of
ARYAEUS), 34

Ablaq (Arab magician, vii-viii), 17

"Abulcasis," 97. See Abu'l-Qásim
-Zahráwí

Acetate of Copper (zangár), 120

Achaemenian dynasty of Persia (vi-iv
B.C.), 19, 22

Achundow, Dr Abdul-Chalig (trans-
lator into German of the oldest extant
Persian work on Materia Medica),
74 n., 77, 93

Aconite (bísh), 120

'Adudu'd-Dawla Fanákhusraw (of the
Buwayhid dynasty, x), 45 n., 46, 53, 54

Africa, North — (-Maghrib), 68, 97, 106-
7. See also Qayruwán, Tunis

Africanus. See Constantinus

Aghrád-i-Tibb ("Aims of Medicine," by
Sayyid Isma'il of Jurján, q.v.), 99

Ahmad ibn Túlún (ruler of Egypt, ix),
101, 102

Ahrún the Priest (medical writer),
55

Ahura Mazda (Ormazd, the Zoroastrian
name of God), 44

Ahwáz (in S.W. Persia), 54, 76

Akhlaq-i-Jalálí (Manual of Ethics, xv),
84

'Alá'u'd-Dawla ibn Kákúya (patron of
Avicenna, xi), 89

'Alá'u'd-Dín Hindú, Khwája — (xiv),
104; —, Malik (India, xiii-xiv), 106,
108

"Albucasis," 97. See Abu'l-Qásim
-Zahráwí

Alchatim (Latin corruption of al-qaṭan,
the loins), 34

Alchemy, 15, 19, 46

Alcohol (Arabic al-kuḥl), 15

Alembic, 15

Aleppo (Halab), 73

Alexander of Macedon, 22; — of
Tralles, 28

Alexandria, 17, 18 and n., 93, 114

Al-hagiazi, alhauis (Latin corruptions
of al-'ajiz, the sacrum), 34

Alhasch (Latin corruption of al-'ishq,
love), 85

Alhosos (Latin corruption of al-'uṣ'uṣ,
the coccyx), 34

'Ali ibn Abí Tálib (the Prophet's cousin
and son-in-law, vii), 9; — ibn Rabban
(teacher of -Rází and author of the
Firdawsu'l-Ḥikmat, q.v., or "Para-

128

Arabian Medicine

dise of Wisdom," ix), 37-39, 66, 117; — ibn Veh-Súdhán (ruler of Tabaristán and patron of -Razi, x), 48; — ibn -'Abbás-Majúsí (called "Haly Abbas" by the Latino-Barbari, author of the Kámíluʻs-Šináʻat, q.v., or Kitáb-Malikí, or "Liber Regius," x), 32, 49, 53-57, 62, 66, 92, 98, 109, 120, 123; — ibn Maʻmún Khwárazmsháh (xi), 59; — ibn Rashíduʻd-Dín, Amír — (xiv), 105

Abú 'Alí Husayn ibn Síná. See
**Avicenna**

Almagest, 58

Aloes, 12

Alsaharavius, 97. See Abu'l-Qásim
-Zahráwí

Amíru'l-Mú'mínín, — Káfírín ("Commander of the Faithful," "— of the Unbelievers"), 5

Amnesia, 42

'Amr ibnu'l-'Áṣ (Muslim conqueror of Egypt, vii), 17

Anatomy, 3, 28, 32, 55, 93, 114, 122.
See Dissection, Galen, de Koning, Simon

Andalusia, 106

Anfas. See Abgas, *supra*.

'Anhúrí, Hunayn, or Yuhanná (Egyptian translator from French and Italian into Arabic, xix), 95

'Antara ibn Shaddád, verses ascribed to — on impotence of physicians, 8

Antimony (for ophthalmia), 12

Antioch, 20, 69, 71, 114

Anúsharwán (Núshírwán), Khusraw — (Sásánian king, vi), 11, 20, 21

Apes used for dissection, 37

Aphorisms of Hippocrates (*Fusúl*), 21,
26, 28, 29, 81

Apoplexy, 78

Arabian Empire (vii-xiii), 4-6

Arabian Medicine, what is meant by —,
2-4, 65

"Arabian Nights" (Alf Layla wa Layla),
25, 31-2

Arabic language, nobility and poten-
tiality of —, 10, 29-30; — proverbs, 1,
2, 63; — verses cited, 8, 9, 30-31

Arabs, character of primitive —, 10, 17,
29; — their limitations, 7-8

Aramaic, 8, 22. See **Syriac**

Ardashír Bábakán (Artakhshatr Pápa-kán, founder of Sásánian dynasty, iii), 19, 23 n.

Arghún (Mongol Íl-Khán of Persia,
xiii), 105

Aristotle, 17, 37, 39, 57, 64, 79, 81

Asad ibn Jání (Arab physician), 8

Asadí (poet and copyist, xi), 93

'Ashaqa (a kind of bindweed, said by Lane to be Dolichos), 118

Ash'arí (narrower and more orthodox school of Muslim theology), 5

Asia Minor (Rúm), 98, 104, 105, 106, 108

Assassins, sect of —, 115

Asthma, 43

Atábeks of Fárs (xiii), 107

"Avenzoar" (Ibn Zuhr), 97

"Averroes" (Ibn Rushd), 97

Avesta (Zoroastrian scriptures), 22, 44

Avicenna (Abu' 'Alí Husayn ibn Síná, called -Shaykh-Ra'ís, the "Chief Master," and -Mu'allim-Thánti, the "Second Teacher," i.e. after Aris-totle, xi), 4, 27, 32, 34, 44-45, 47, 54, 57-64, 66, 67, 68, 78 n., 81, 84-89, 91, 92, 93, 98, 103, 109, 113, 123, 124

'Awášim (Asia Minor), 108

'Awfí, Muhammad — (author of an im-
mense collection of stories in Persian
entitled *Jawámi'u'l-Ḥikáyát wa
Lawámi'u'r-Riwáyát*, xiii), 75, 78-79

'Azímu'd-Dín Ahmad (Catalogue of the Arabic Medical Works in the Oriental Public Library at Bankipore, Calcutta, 1910), 114

Baalbek (Ba'labakk, in Syria), 27

Bábak (heresiarch, ix), 38

Badr, Battle of — (vii), 11

Baghdád (capital of 'Abbásid Caliphs from middle of eighth to thirteenth centuries), 2, 5, 6, 14, 17, 19, 23, 25, 38, 40, 45, 54, 66, 74, 77, 91, 95, 104, 105, 114

Balkh, 58

Index

129

Bankipore Oriental Public Library, 114

Bar Hebraeus (xiii), 100-101

Barmecides (Ál-i-Barmak, viii-ix), 57

Başra, 27, 104, 108

Bátiniyya ("Esoterics"), 115

Ibn Batúta (Arab traveller, xiv), 101

Ibnu'l-Baytár (of Malaga, botanist), 98

Baytu'l-Hikmat ("House of Wisdom," the Royal Library at Baghdad, ix), 5

Bedouin. See Arabs, primitive

Berlin library, 49, 61 n., 66

Bernard (treasurer of Count Foulques of Anjou, xii), 71

Berthelot (Hist. de la Chimie au Moyen Âge), 15

Bêth Lâpât, 20. See Jundî Sábúr

Bevan, Prof. A. A. —, vii, 17 n.

Bímáristán (hospital) of Jundi-Sábúr, 23; of Baghdad, 45, 46, 54; of Cairo, 101-2

Bírá (Aramaic or Syriac name), 8

-Bírúní, Abú Rayhán—(astronomer and chronologist, x-xi), 6

Bistám (in N.E. Persia), 75

Bodleian Library, 48, 49, 67, 91, 114

Boswellia thurifera (Kundur), 51, 52

Brescia, 48

British Museum, 26, 28, 49, 61, 66, 114

Brockelmann (Gesch. d. Arab. Litt.), 3, 54, 60, 72

Budge, Dr E. Wallis —, 19, 22.

Buhár (sea-sickness), 35

Bukhárá, 58, 82

-Bukhárí (traditionist, author of the Şahlıh), 12

Bukht-Yishú' (family which produced several notable physicians, viii-xi), 23. See also Jibrá'il, Júrjís

Burmán-i-Qáti (Persian lexicon), 78 n.

Burton, Sir Richard — ("Arabian Nights"), 32 n.

Bury, Professor —, 18

Burzúya (physician of Khusraw Anú-sharwán the Sásánian, vi), 21

Ibn Butlán (Arab physician, xi), 72-3

Buwayhid (or Daylamite) dynasty (x-xi), 45, 53, 88. See also 'Aḍudu'd-Dawla

Byzantines, 21, 67

B. A. M.

Caesar, 4

Caesarea (Qaysariyya), 108

Caesarean section, 79

Cairo, 94, 95, 101-102

Calcutta, 114

Caliphate (Khilafat), 4

Caliphs (Khalifa, pl. Khulafá), the Four Orthodox; 9; Umayyad —, 9, 14, 15, 16, 19; 'Abbásid —, see 'Abbásid Caliphs, supra

Cambridge University Library, 48, 99

Cancer (Saraṭán), 43

Capillary system adumbrated in tenth century by 'Alí ibnu'l-'Abbás, 124

Cardiac Drugs, Avicenna's work on —, 61

Carra de Vaux, Baron —, 117 n.

Caspian Sea, 37, 85

Catarrh, 35, 43

Catholic Press, Beyrout, 101

Cautery, 12

Chahár Maqála ("Four Discourses," by Nizámí-i-'Arúdí of Samarqand, xii), 50, 59 n., 62-64, 75 n., 79-80, 84-85, 88-89, 99, 118

Chaldaea (Sawád), 27

Channing (translation and text of -Rázi's De Pestilentiâ), 47

Charrae (Harrán), 27

China, 106, 109

Chosroes, 4, 11, 20. See Khusraw

Christian physicians eminent in early Muslim times, 2, 8, 17-18, 21, 24, 26, 27, 38, 66, 100; — for the most part ignorant in time of Crusades, 70-72; — of Byzantium amazed at Arabian love of learning, 67; — of St John the Baptist, 27; see also Mughtasila, Sabaeans

Chrysorrhoas, John of Damascus so called, 15

Chwolson (Ssabier und Ssabismus), 27

Chyle (Kaylús), 121

"Civitas Hippocratica," 23, 68

Clot Bey, 94-95, 102

Coccyx ('uṣ'uṣ), 34

Colic (qúlunj), 43, 48, 59

Colocynth, 78

9

130

Arabian Medicine

"Complexions," or "Temperaments"
(Mizáj, pl. Amzija), 119

Constantinople, 67, 107

Constantinus Africanus, 68

"Continens" of Rhazes. See -Hawí of
-Rází

Cordova (Qurṭuba), 97, 106

Correspondences, 115-117

Cowley, Dr —, 49

Crises, 43

Crusaders, 68-72

Ctesias, 22

Ctesiphon (-Madā'in), 14

Cupping (ḥifáma), 12, 43

Damascus, 9, 14, 100, 102

Dánish-náma-i-ʻAlá'í (by Avicenna),
60 and n.

Dante, 87

Daphne oleoïdes (Mezereon), 77

Darwinism foreshadowed, 118-119

Date-palm, fecundation of —, 13

"Daughters of the Elements" (Banátu'l-Arkán), the four Humours so called,
121

Derenbourg, M. Hartwig —, 69

Dhakhíra-i-Khwárazmsháhí (Persian
"Thesaurus" of Medicine, xii), 6-7,
81, 86-87, 92, 98-99, 109-111

Dieterici, 118

Diocletian, era of —, 18

Dioscorides, 28, 67, 74 n., 98

Dissection, 36-37. See also Ana-
tomy

Dragon's Blood (damu'l-akhawayn),
51-52

Dropsy (istisqá), 36, 43; — cured, 72-73,
75-78

Dúbán the physician, 25

Duwár (Vertigo), 35

Edessa, 21, 114

Egypt, 14, 17-19, 30, 94-95, 97, 98,
100-103, 109

Egyptians, 9, 17-19, 22, 36, 94-95

Έισαγωγή, 58

Elements, the Four —, 44, 116-117

Elephantiasis, 43

Ellis, Mr A. G. —, 60 n.

Empyrean (-Falak-Aṭlas, Falaku'l-Aflák), 118

England, Egyptian students first sent
to — in 1813, 94

Epilepsy, 42

Epistaxis, 43

Ergot (qurún-i-sunbul), 120

Erysipelas, 43

Escorial library, 48, 61 n., 114

Ethé, Dr Hermann —, 60

Evil Eye ('Aynu'l-Kamál, the "Eye of
Perfection"), 12, 42

Evolution, 118-119

Facial paralysis, 43

Abu'l-Fadl of Sáwa, Mírzá — (physician
and writer, xix), 36

-Fákhir, -Kitáb — (ascribed to -Rází), 48

Falaku'l-Aflák, -Falak-Aṭlas (Empy-
rean), 118

Fanákhusraw, 53. See ‘Aḍudu’d-
Dawla

-Fárábí (philosopher, x), 58

Faragut, Fararius (Jewish translator
from Arabic into Latin, xiii), 68

-Faraj ba'd -Shidda ("Relief after
Distress," Arabic collection of stories
by -Tanúkhí, x), 50, 73-78

Abu'l-Faraj Gregorius. See Bar He-
braeus

Farhang-i-Násirí (Persian lexicon, xix),
78 n.

Fárs (Párs, Persis proper), 107

Abu'l-Fath (Arab artisan, xii), 71

Fees earned by Arab physicians, 57

Fennel-flower (Nigella sativa), 12

Fever called "an exhalation from Hell,"
12; — described in verse by -Mutan-
abbí, 30-31; varieties of —, 43;
clinical notes on a case of — by
-Rází, 51-53

Fihrist ("Index" of Arabian sciences,
x), 3, 6, 15, 20, 25, 26, 37, 38, 46, 49,
54

Firdawsí (Persian poet, xi), 79

Firdawsu'l-Ḥikmat ("Paradise of Wis-
dom," by 'Alí ibn Rabban-Ṭabari,
ix), 34, 38-44, 66, 116-117

FitzGerald, Edward —, 60-61

Index

131

Flagellation, therapeutic —, 78

*Folia Indica*, or *Malabathrum* (sádhaj-i-hindí), 108

Fonahn (Zur Quellenkunde der Per-
sischen Medizin), 92, 99, 107

Foulques of Anjou, Count —, 71

"Four Discourses." See Chahár Maqála

Four Elements, — Natures, 44. See
under Elements and Natures

France, Egyptian medical students in
—, 94

Franks, 69-72. See also Crusaders

"Frogs' coat" or "wool" (Jáma-i-ghúk, Pashm-i-Wazagh, Jul-i-Wazagh, a kind of water-weed called in Arabic *tuhlub*), 74 and n.

Galen (Jálínús), 14, 21, 25, 28, 33, 39, 55, 63, 68, 81, 85 n., 91, 104, 114.
See also Simon, Max —

Gangrene, 43

Garrison (*History of Medicine*), 3

Geber. See Jásbir íbn Ḥayyán

Gerard of Cremona (xii), 61, 68, 98

Ghassán, 10

Ghátafar (quarter of Samarqand), 88

Umm Ghaylán (daughter of the Arabic poet Jarír), 17

Gházán (Mongol Íl-Khán of Persia,
xiii-xiv), 103

Ghazna, 59, 84

Gibbon's *Decline and Fall*, ed. Bury, 18
de Goeje, Professor —, 117 n.

"Golden Age" of Arabian civilization
(A.D. 750-850), 5, 6, 9, 33, 66, 91

Goldziher, Professor Ignaz —, 7

Gotha library, 54, 61 n.

Gout, 43, 48

Greece, 98

Greek learning, 2, 3, 5-6, 9, 15, 17-19,
21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 65, 67-68, 112-
113

Greenhill (English translation of -Rází's de Pestilentiá), 47

Guillaume de Bures, 70

Gundê Shápúr. See Jundí Sábúr

Gurgán. See Jurján

Gúsh-Khúrak (ear-wig), 79

Ḥabbába (beloved of Yazíd ibn ‘Abdu’l-
Malik), 30

Ḥajjáy ibn Yúsuf (vii), 16

Ḥájji Khalífa (Turkish bibliographer,
xvii), 3

Abu’l-Ḥakam (Christian physician of
Umayyad period, vii), 16

Ḥakím (applied both to the physician and the metaphysician), 5

Halíla (myrobolan), 87

"Haly Abbas." See 'Alī Ibnu'l-
'Abbās-Majúsí 53-7, 109-101, 123, 67

Hamadán, 59, 103, 107

-Ḥárith ibn Kalada (Arab physician contemporary with the Prophet), 10, 11 and n., 12

Abu'l-Ḥárith, 8. See Asad ibn Jání

Harrán (Charrae), 27, 40

Hárúnu'r-Rashíd (ix), 5, 31, 57

Ḥasan-i-Tálaqání, Mírzá —, entitled
Adíb (Persian writer, xix), 36

-Ḥāwī of -Rází (known to medieval Europe as the "Continens"), 47, 48-53, 55-56, 66-67, 68, 92, 113-114

Hazár-páy (millipede), 79

Headache, 4 ("soda," i.e. *ṣudā*), 12,
35; (*shaqīqa* "migraine," and *san-
wartā*), 42

Hebrews, 2. See Jews

Heliopolis, 94

Hellenopolis, 27. See Ḥarrán

Herba Lentis Palustris, 74 n.

Hiccough (*fuwáq*), 43

Hilla, 104

Hippocrates (*Buqrát*), 4, 21, 25, 28, 33,
39, 47, 55, 63, 68, 81, 91

Híra, 10, 24

Homer, 24

Horn, Dr Paul —, 93

Hospital, regular attendance at — re-
commended by ‘Alī ibnu’l-‘Abbás, 56.
See also Bímáristán

Ḥubaysh (pupil of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq,
q.v.), 26

Humours, the four — (-Akhlát-arba‘a),
119-122

Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (“Johannitius,” trans-
lator from Greek into Syriac or
Arabic), 24-26, 39

132

Arabian Medicine

Abu'l-Husn (owner of the slave-girl Tawaddud), 31

Hyrcania, 85, 98. See Jurján

Hyrtl, Dr — (Das Arabische und Hebräische in der Anatomie), 34

Íáθριππα (Yathrib, -Madína), 9

Ibráhím ibn Thábit ibn Qurra (ix-x), 27

Abú Ibráhím (kunya), 8

“Ilixi” (Latin corruption of al-‘ishq, “love”), 85. See also Alhasch, supra

India, 21, 105, 109

India Office Library, 93

Indian science, 2, 9, 39, 42, 65

Inoculation for small-pox, 94

Abú ‘Isá (kunya), 8

‘Isá ibn Ḥakam (medical writer, vii), 16

‘Isá ibn Shahlá (pupil of Júrjís ibn Bukht-Yishú’, viii), 23

‘Isá ibn Yaḥyá (pupil of Hunayn), 25

Isfandiyár (legendary Persian hero), 11

Isháq ibn Hunayn, 54

Isma‘il ibn ‘Abbád, entitled Sáḥib, 39; Sayyid Zaynu’d-Dín — of Jurján (xii, author of the Dhakhíra-i-Khwára-zmsháhí, q.v.), 81, 87, 98, 99

Isma‘ílí sect, 58, 115

Istisqá (dropsy), 36

Italy, Egyptian students in — in 1813 and 1816, 94

Jábir ibn Hayyán (“Geber”), 15. See also Alchemy

Jacobite Christians, 17

Jáhiliyyat (pagan days of the Arabs before Islám), 9. See also Arabs, character of primitive —

-Jáḥiẓ (author of Kitábu’l-Bukhalá), 7

Jalálu’d-Dín Rúmi (Persian mystical poet, xiii), 87; — (son of “Rashid the physician” and governor of Asia Minor, xiii-xiv), 105

Jalap (julláb), 41

Jáma-i-ghúk (water-weed), 74

Jámí (Persian poet, xv), 84, 89

-Jámi‘ (by -Rází), 48

Jamna (river in India), 105

Jarír (Arab poet of Umayyad period), 17

Jawámi‘u’l-Ḥikāyát (Persian collection of stories by Muḥammad ‘Awfi, xiii), 78-79

Ibnu’l-Jazzár (physician of Qayruwán), 97

Jerusalem captured by Crusaders, 69

Jews as contributors to Muslim learning, 2, 7, 8, 38, 66

Jibrá’il ibn Bukht-Yishú‘ (d. 830), 23, 57; — ibn ‘Ubaydu’lláh, of the same family (d. 1006), 23

Johannitius. See Hunayn

John the Grammarian (-Naḥwí, Philoponus, vi or vii), 17-18; — of Damascus (called Chrysorrhoas, vii), 15

Jolly, Professor —, 93

Jubál (hypothetical word to denote mountain-sickness), 36

Judhám (elephantiasis), 35

Jul-i-Wazagh (“frogs’ cloth,” a kind of water-weed), 74 n.

Ibn Juljul (Spanish physician, x), 97

Julláb (jalap), 41

Jundí Sábúr or Shápúr (Gundê Shápúr, the great medical school of Sásánian and early Muslim times), 8, 11, 19-24, 34, 54, 76, 114

Jurján (Gurgán, Hyrcania), 59, 84, 87, 98

Júrjís ibn Bukht-Yishú', 23-4

Justinian, the Emperor —, 11

-Káfi (of -Rází), 48

Kalíla and Dimna, Book of —, 21

Kámiluʻṣ-Ṣināʻat (or -Kitáb-Malikí, “Liber Regius,” of ‘Alí ibnu’l-‘Abbás-Majúsi, q.v.), 49 n., 109, 123-124

“Karabitus” (misreading for Farránítis, ῶpevītis, frensy), 113

Ibn Khaldún (historian, xiv), 7, 13-14, 96

Khálid ibn Yazíd (Umayyad prince devoted to Alchemy, vii), 15, 19

Ibn Khallikán (biographer, xiii), 100

-Khiṭaṭ (of -Maqrízí, xv), 101-102

Khiva (Khwárazm), 59, 81, 98

Khuffī-i-‘Alā’ī (Manual of Medicine by Zaynu’d-Dín Isma’il of Jurján, xii), 99

Index

133

Khumár (wine-headache), 36

Khurásán, 45, 75, 84

Khusraw (Chosroes, Kisrá) Anúshar-
wán or Núshírwán (Sásánian king of
Persia, vi), 11, 20, 21

Khúzistán, 19

Khwárazm, 59, 81, 98

King's College, Cambridge, 48

Kisrá ("Chosroes"), 11, 20. See
Khusraw

Kitáb -Bukhalá ("Book of Misers," by
- Jáhiz), 7; — Faraj ba‘d -Shidda
("Relief after Distress," by -Tan-
úkhí), 50, 73-78; — Hámí, q.v.; —
-Mabda wa‘l-Ma‘íd (by Avicenna,
xi), 84; — Malikí (the "Liber
Regius" of ‘Alí ibnu‘l-‘Abbás-Ma-
júsí, x), 47, 49 n., 53-57, 66, 92,
120; see also Kámilu‘s-Šiná‘at,
supra; — Mansúrí (by -Rází, x),
45, 48, 56; — Tanbíh wa‘l-Ishráf
(Mas‘údí), 117 and n.

de Koning, Dr P. —, 3, 47, 55, 122

Krehl, L. —, 18

von Kremer, Baron Alfred —, 14, 57,
96 n.

Kúfa, 76

Kunnásh (of ‘Isá ibn Ḥakam), 16

Lagarde, 7

Lahore, Oriental College, 104

Lane, Edward —, 32, 101 n., 102

Latá'if-í-Rashídiyya (medical work by
Maḥmúd ibn Ilyás, xiv), 107

Latin translations from Arabic, 2, 4, 6,
15, 26-27, 28, 34, 95, 113

"Latino-Barbari," 4, 24, 32, 35, 66,
113

Laurel-spurge, 77

Layard, 19 n.

Lebanon, 69

Leclerc, Dr L. — (Histoire de la Médecine
Arabe), 3, 11, 17, 18, 26, 72, 95, 98

Leech swallowed, 74-75

Lemna (water-weed), 74 n.

Lepers (segregated by -Walíd in A.D.
707), 16-17

Leprosy, 12, 43

Leyden, 61 n.

"Liber Almansoris," 45, 48, 75. See
also -Kitáb-Manṣūrí

"Liber Regius." See Kámiluʻs-
Ṣináʻat and -Kitáb-Malikí

Lippert, Dr Julius —, 100. See also
-Qiftí (author of the Ta'ríkhu'l-
Hukamá)

Litharge (murdásang), 120

Livre d'Avertissement (Kitábu't-Tanbíh
of -Mas'údí), 117 and n.

Locusts as food, 77-78, 81

Love as a malady, 85-88

Lupus, 43

Lyons, 53, 109

-Ma‘arrí, Abu’l-‘Alá — (Arabic poet,
xi), 95-96

Macnaghten (ed. of Alf Layla or "Arabian Nights"), 32 n.

Mádharyún or Mázaryún (Mezereon,
Daphne oleoïdes), 77-78

-Madína (the ancient Yathrib), 4, 9

Maḍíra (a kind of broth), 75

Madkhal (-Rází's "Introduction" to the
Practice of Medicine, x), 48

Magian (or Zoroastrian, q.v.), 2, 53

Ibn Mahdí (physician, xiv), 107

Abú Máhir Músá ibn Sayyár (teacher of
‘Alí ibnu‘l-‘Abbás-Majúsí, x), 53-54

Maḥmúd, Sultán — of Ghazna (x-xi),
59, 84; — ibn Ilyás (physician, xiv),
105, 107

Maimonides (Músá ibn Maymún, xii), 97

Majlis-i-Ṣiḥḥat ("Council of Health" at
Tíhrán, xix), 93

Majmaʻuʻl-Fuṣaḥá (anthology of Per-
sian poets, xix), 61

-Majúsí ("Haly Abbas," physician, x).
See 'Alí ibnu'l-'Abbás —

Makhzanu'l-Asrár (Persian poem by
Nizámí of Ganja, xii), 89-90

Makhzúm (Arab tribe), 16

Malabathrum (sádhaj-i-hindí), 108

Malaga, 98

-Ma‘mún (‘Abbásid Caliph, ix), 5

Manchu (writing), 22

Manes (Mání) the heresiarch (iv), 20

Manna, 12

-Manṣúr ('Abbásid Caliph, viii), 5, 23;

9-3

134

Arabian Medicine

(John of Damascus so named), 15;
Qalā'ún -Malik — (xiii), 101-102;
— ibn Ishāq ibn Aḥmad (governor of
Ray and patron of -Rāzī, x), 45, 75 n.,
82; — ibn Muhāmmad (Persian
anatomist, xiv), 93

Abú Manṣúr Muwaffaq of Herát (author
of oldest Persian Materia Medica, x), 93

Maqála fī Khalqī'l-Insān (Arabic work
on Embryology, etc., by Saʻíd ibn
Hibat'u'lláh, xi), 125

- Maqrízí (author of -Khiṭaṭ, q.v.),
101-102

Marágha (in N.W. Persia), 101

Mará'íl (Syriac name), 8

Margoliouth, Professor D. S. —, 49, 100

Máristán (for Bímáristán, hospital), 23,
46, 101-102

Ibn Másawayh, Yuhanná — ("Messues," ix), 8, 24, 25, 37, 39

- Masʻúdí (Arab geographer and his-
torian, x), 117

Mathnawī (Persian poem, xiv), 87-88

Mazdayasnian (Zoroastrian), 22

Mázyár (Persian patriot and rebel, ix), 38

Measles (-Rází on —), 47

Mecca, 4

Melancholia, 85, 88-89

Merv, 37, 83, 88 n.

Mesopotamia, 97

"Messues," 8. See Ibn Másawayh,
supra

Mezereon (Daphne oleoides), 77 and
78 n.

Michael de Capella, 53

Migraine (hemicrania, shaqīqa), 12, 35

Millipede (hazár-páy), 79

Missing link, 118-119

Mizāj (pl. Amzīja). See "Complexions"

Mongols (Tatars, Tartars), 4, 6, 91, 100,
101, 103; letters of the —, 22

Monte Casino, 68

Moore, Sir Norman —, vii, 1, 125

Muʻallim-i-thānī (the "Second Great
Teacher"), title of Avicenna, q.v.

Muʻáwiya (Umayyad Caliph, vii), 15, 16

Múbadh (Zoroastrian priest), 79

Mughtasila (Šabaeans, so-called "Christians of St John the Baptist"), 27

Muhāmmad the Prophet (vi-vii), 4, 9,
11, 21; — ibn -Nīlī (xiv), 104; —
Abarqūhí (xiv), 104; — ‘Alí (Khedive
of Egypt), 94; Shaykh — Mahdí
(xix), 36; Mírzá — ibn ‘Abdu’l-
Wahháb (xix-xx), 11 n., 80, 84; —
Shafi‘ (Professor at Oriental College,
Lahore), 104

Multán, 105

-Mulúkī, -Kītāb — (by -Rází, not to be
confounded with al-Kītābu’l-Malikī,
the “Liber Regius” of ‘Alí ibnu’l
-‘Abbás-Majúsi), 48

Munaytira, Castle of — in Syria, 69

Munich Library, 48, 114

-Muqtadī ('Abbāsid Caliph, xi), 125

-Muqtadir ('Abbāsid Caliph, x), 40

Músá ibn Maymún, 97. See Maimo-
nides

Mustashfá (hospital), 102

Mutakharrij (graduate), 40

-Mutanabbí (Arabic poet, x), 30-31

-Mu‘taṣīm (‘Abbāsid Caliph, ix), 37

-Mutawakkil ('Abbāsid Caliph, ix), 38,
66

-Mu‘tazila (sect), 5

Myrobolan (halīla), 87

Naḍr ibn -Hārith (vii), 11 and n.

-Nahḍuṭ-'l-akhīra (the "latest revival"
of learning in the East), 94 and n.

Náma-i-Dánishwarán (the "Book of
Learned Men," xix), 36

Násīru’d-Dín Sháh (xix), 36, 93

Nasnás (a wild man, the missing link between apes and men), 119

Natures, the Four — (-ṭabā’i’-arba’),
116

Nawádir (quaint and rare anecdotes),
73

"Neguegidi" (Latin corruption of
-nawájīdh), 34

Neo-Platonists, 11, 21

Nestorian Christians, 21, 22

Neuburger, Dr Max —, vi, 3, 47, 66

Nigella sativa (fennel-flower), 12

Nightmare, 42

Nizámí of Ganja (Persian poet, author
of the Khamsa or "Five Treasures,"

Index

135

xii), 89-90; — i-‘Arúdí of Samarqand
(author of the Chahár Maqála, q.v.),
50, 63, 79

Nöldeke, Professor Th. —, 20 n., 23 n.
"Nose-death," 125

"Nuaged," 34. See "Neguegidi," *supra*
Nubia, apes from —, 37

Núh ibn Mansúr (Sámánid king, A.D.
976-997), 58

"Number of All Things" ('Adadu kulli
shay'), 32

Numbers, mystical significance of —,
32, 115

*Núr-i-‘Uthmániyya Library (Constanti-
nople),* 107

Núru’d-Dín, 102

Oils, aromatic vegetable —, 104-105,
107, 108

Ophthalmia, 12

Oribasius, 28, 33, 55

Oxus (Ámú, Jayhún), 82, 83, 105

Oxymel (sirkangabín), 41, 87

Pagel, 3, 66

Pahlawí inscriptions, 20

Pain, noun of —, 4, 5, 35

Palpitation, 42

"Paradise of Wisdom." See Firdaw-
su’l-Ḥikmāt, *supra*

Paralysis, 43

Paris, 94

Paris, Matthew — (xiii), 6

Pashm-i-ghúk ("frogs' wool," a kind of
water-weed), 74

Paul of Aegina, 28, 33, 55

Persian influences on, and contributions
to, "Arabian" learning, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14,
65; — Empire, 10

Peste, Pestilentiâ, de — (by -Rází), 47

Pestilence, 12

Petrograd, 48

факъс (Herba Lentis Palustris), 74 n.

Phlebotomy, 41, 43

φρενῖτις, 113

Plague, 43

Playfair, Ernest — (translator of Prof.
Max Neuburger’s *Gesch. d. Medizin*),
47 n.

Pleurisy, 12, 43, 56, 78

Pocock's ed. of the *Mukhtaṣaru'd-Duwal* of Bar Hebraeus, 101

Pognon, H. — (Une Version Syriaque des Aphorismes d'Hippocrate), 21, and n., 28-29

Poison, duel by —, 90; varieties of —,
111

Polak, Dr —, 93

*Press and Poetry of Modern Persia*, by
E. G. Browne, 94 n.

Prognostics, 26

Prolegomena (-Muqaddama) of Ibn
Khaldún, 7

“Prophetic Medicine,” 12–13

Psychotherapeutis, 81-84

Ptolemy, 118

Pulse (nabāḍ), 42, 43, 60, 85-88

Pyelitis, 53

Qábús ibn Washmgír (xi), 59

Qalá'ún (xiii), 101

Qánún (of Avicenna), 4, 13, 27, 34, 47,
54, 61-63, 66, 78 n., 81, 85, 89, 92,
98, 109, 113, 122, 123

Qánúncha (abridgment of above), 13

Qáren (Persian noble house), 38

Abu'l-Qásim, 97. See Zahráwí

Qaşru'l-'Ayní hospital (Cairo), 94

Qayruwán, 97, 106

-Qiftí (Jamálu'd-Dín Abu'l-Ḥasan 'Alí
ibn Yúsuf —, xiii, author of the
Ta'ríkhu'l-Ḥukamá), 3, 10, 17, 18,
23 n., 24, 37, 38, 40, 46, 48, 53, 54,
57, 60, 100

Qinnasrín, 108

Quatremère, Étienne — (Hist. des
Mongols), 103

Quicksilver employed by -Rází in a case
of intussusception, 78

Qur'án, 7, 11, 12, 13, 32, 58, 106, 108, 115

Quṣṭá ibn Lúqá (of Baalbek, d. A.D.
923), 27

Qutbu'd-Dín of Shíráz (xiv), 105

Rabban ("our teacher," "our master"),
37-38

Rab'-i-Rashidí (quarter of Tabriz, xiv),
103, 104, 106, 108-109

136

Arabian Medicine

Ragha (ancient name of Ray), 44

Rashidábád (quarter of Tabriz), 109

Rashídu'd-Dín Fadlu'lláh ("Rashid the Physician," xiii-xiv), 103-109; — Abú Haliqa, 85 n.

Rawlinson, Sir H. R. —, 19 n.

Ray (Ragha of the Avesta, situated near to the modern Tïhrán), 44, 45, 75 n.

-Rází, Abú Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyá of Ray, hence called -Rází (Rhazes of medieval Europe, x), 32, 38, 44-53, 55, 62, 66, 67, 68, 74-75, 78, 82-84, 91, 92, 98, 113-114

"Rectification" (İslâh) of the Qánún of Avicenna denounced, 63

Renascence, 2-3

Rhazes. See -Rází, supra

Rheumatism, 43, 48, 81, 82-84

Rieu, Dr Ch. —, 60 n.

Rocco = Arabic Rukka, 65 n.

Roman Empire, 10

Ross, Sir E. Denison —, 114

Rúdába (mother of Rustam), 79

Rufus of Ephesus, 28, 33

Ibn Rushd ("Averroes"), 97

Rustam, 11, 79

SabaeanS, 27, 66

Sa'du'd-Dín (governor in Asia Minor, xiv), 108

-Sāḥīh (Collection of Traditions) of -Bukhárí, 12

Sahl, called Rabban (father of 'Alí ibn Rabban of Ṣabaristán, q.v.), 37

Ṣá'id, the Qáḍí —, 44

Saʻid ibn Hibatu'lláh, Abu'l-Ḥasan — (Court-physician to the Caliph -Muqtaḍí, xi), 125

St Bartholomew's Hospital, 125

Saladdin, 97, 102

Salerno, 68

Ṣalíbá (Syrian name), 8

Sámánid dynasty, 58, 84

Samarqand, 9, 79, 88, 107

Sanwartā (a Syriac word of Persian origin, meaning primarily a helmet, and then a headache involving the whole head), 35

Sar-i-Pul ("Bridge-end" in Samarqand), 88

Sarbát, or Sarnáb (name of Indian physician, supposed contemporary of Aristotle), 79

Sásánian dynasty (iii-vii), 14, 19, 22. See also Khusraw Anúsharwán, Jundí Sábúr, etc.

Schindler, Sir Albert Houtum- —, 103

Schlimmer's Terminologie Médico-Pharmaceutique etc., 77, 93-94

Sciatica, 43

Scorpions, oil of —, 105

Scot, Michael —, 98

Scrofula, 43

Seligmann, Dr F. R. —, 93

Sensus communis (-hiss-mushtarik), 123

Ibn Serapion, Yuhanná —, 55

Sergius of Ra'su'l-'Ayn (d. A.D. 536), 21

Seville, 97, 107

Sháhábád (village now occupying site of Jundí Sábúr), 19

Sháh-náma of Firdawsí (xi), 79

Shahrazúrí (author of a History of Philosophers), 100

Shamsu'd-Dawla of Hamadán, Amír — (patron of Avicenna), 59

Shápúr I (iii), 19-20; — II (iv), 20-21

Shaqíga (migraine), 35

Shatṭu'l-'Arab, 27

-Shaykh-Ra'ís ("the Chief Master"), 57. See Avicenna

Shayzar (in Syria), 71, 72

Shíráz, 107

Shock, 43

Silsilatu'dh-Dhahab (the "Chain of Gold," poem by Jámí, xv), 84, 89

Simon, Dr Max —, 3, 28, 114, 122

Sinán ibn Thábit ibn Qurra, 27, 40-41

Sirkangabín (oxymel), 41, 87

de Slane, Baron McGuckin — (translation of Ibn Khallikán's biographies), 7, 100

Small-pox, 43, 47, 94

"Soda" (Latin transcription of *Sudá*, headache), 4, 35

Sontheimer, 98

Spain, 9, 14, 97-98

Spasm, 43

Index

137

Spheres, the twelve —, 118

Spirits, the three — (Natural, Animal and Psychical), 124, 125

Spurge-flax (Mezereon), 77

Steinschneider, Dr Moritz —, 47, 68 n.

Stephen the Philosopher, 53

Στοιχεία (ustuquşşát, elements), 121

Stone, -Rází on —, 47

Strassburg, 72

Styptic, ashes of burnt matting used as
—, 12

Sudhoff, Dr Karl —, 93

Sydenham Society, 47

Syria, 14, 27, 69, 101, 104, 109

Syriac language, 6, 26, 28, 33, 35, 95, 101; — Book of Medicines (ed. and transl. by Dr E. Wallis Budge), 22

Syrian contributions to "Arabian" Science, 2, 7, 21-22, 28-29, 55, 94

Syro-Persian technical terms, 34-35

-Tabarí (Arab historian), 16, 38-39

Tabaristán, 37, 38, 48

Tabríz, 94, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108

"Tacuini Sanitatis," 72. See Taqwîmuʻs-Ṣîḥḥa

Tafhim (manual of Astronomy by -Bírúní, xi), 6

Tamím, Shaykh Abu'l-Wafá —, 71

-Tanúkhí (author of -Faraj ba'da 'sh-Shidda, x), 50, 73, 78

Taqwîmuʻs-Ṣîḥḥa (by Ibn Buṭlán, d. A.D. 1063), 72

Tartars (more correctly Tatars), 4, 6. See Mongols

Tawaddud the slave-girl, 31-32

Terminology, evolution of Arabic medi-
cal —, 33-36

Terra sigillata (-ţīn -makhtūm), 51, 52,
107

Tetanus, 42, 43

Thábit ibn Qurra (ix), 27; — (physician
to Usáma's uncle), 69-70

Theodorus, Theodosius, 16, 20

"Thesaurus." See Dhakíra-i-Khwá-
razmsháhí

Tholozon, Dr —, 93

Ṭibb-Ḥabī (the "Prophet's Medicine"),
11-14; — Yūnāní ("Greek Medi-

cine"), 62, 93; — *Rukka* ("Old Wives' Medicine"), 65

Tigris (Dijla), 37

Tíhrán, 36, 44, 93, 94

Tinnitus, 42

Toledo (Tulaytula), 97, 98

Torpor, 42

Translator's methods, 26, 28-29, 95

Transoxiana (Má wará'a'n-Nahr), 82, 84

Trinity, doctrine of the —, 17

Tripoli (in Africa), 106

Tuhfatu'l-Hukamá (by Mahmúd ibn
Ilyás, xiv), 107

Tuhłub (a kind of water-weed), 74

Tunis, 68, 97, 106, 107

Turkish influence on Muslim theology,
5; — terminology borrowed from
Arabic, 36

Abú ‘Ubayd -Júzjání (disciple and biog-
rapher of Avicenna, xi), 58-59

'Umar ibn Yahyá -‘Alawí, Abú ‘Alí —,
76; — -i-Khayyám (xi-xii), 60

Umayyad Caliphs, 9, 14-17, 19

Urdú language, 36, 98

Urine (bawl), 42, 43, 51-53

Usáma ibn Munqidh (Syrian *amṣr*, xii), 69-73

Ibn Abi Uṣaybi'a (author of the *Tabaqátu'l-Aṭibbá*, or "Classes of Physicians," xiii), 3, 10, 11, 16n., 37, 44 n., 45, 46, 50, 54, 59 n., 75 n., 85 n, 100, 125 n.

Ustuquṣṣát (στοιχεία, elements), 121

Ibn Uthál (physician to Muʻáwiya, vii),
16

Úyghúr script, 22

Vacuum and Plenum (Khalá wa Malá),
118

Valerian, the Emperor —, 20

Van Vloten, 7 n.

Veh-az-Andev ("Better than Antioch"),
20. See Jundī Sábūr

Vendīdād (Avesta), 22, 44 n.

Verdigris (zangár), 120

Vertigo (duwár), 35, 42

Vinegar as a therapeutic agent, 71,
72-73

138

Arabian Medicine

Vipers, therapeutic use of —, 72–73, 81

Virchow’s *Archiv*, 47 n., 68 n.

Virtues, Natural —, 122–123

Vital Spirit, 123

Vollers, 65 n.

Ibnu'l-Wāfid (“Aben Guefit”), 97

Walíd (Umayyad Caliph, viii), 16
*Wasserlinde* (Arabic *Tuhlub*), 74 n.

Wenrich, 3

Withington, E. T. — (Medical History
from the earliest times), 3, 67

Wright, Dr William —, 101

Wüstenfeld, Ferdinand — (author of
*Die Academien der Araber und ihre
Lehrer*, 1837, and *Geschichte der
Arabischen Aerzte*, 1840), 3

Yádgár (“the Remembrancer,” a manual
of Medicine by Zaynu’d-Dín Isma’íl
of Jurján, xii), 99

Yahyá-Nahwí (“John the Grammarian,”
“John Philoponus,” vi or vii), 17–18,
26

Yáqút (geographer and biographer, xiii),
38, 100

Yathrib ('Íáθριππα'), 9. See *-Madína*

Yazíd ibn ‘Abdu’l-Malik (Umayyad
Caliph, viii), 30

*Year amongst the Persians*, by E. G.
Browne, 123 n.

Yuhanná. See Ibn Másawayh, Ibn
Serapion

Yúsuf the physician, 24–25

Abú Za‘bal (site of first modern hospital
at Cairo), 94

-Zahráwí, Abu'l-Qásim — (Moorish surgeon, x, known to medieval Europe as “Alsaharavius,” “Abulca-sis” and “Albucasis”), 97

Zahrún, family of —, 27

Abú Zakariyyá (Christian *kunya*), 8

Zaydán, Jurjí — (Syrian writer and publicist, editor of *-Hildl*, xix–xx), 94, 95 n.

Zaynab (woman oculist in Umayyad period), 16

Zaynu'd-Dín Isma'íl of Jurján, Sayyid
— (Persian physician, xii), 98–100.
See also **Dhakhíra-i-Khwárazm-sháhí**

Zhukovski, Valentin —, 88 n.

Zoháb, 19 n.

Zoroastrians, 22, 53, 54, 66, 79. See
also **Avesta, Magian**

Ibn Zuhr of Seville (Moorish physician,
xii, known to medieval Europe as
*Avenzoar*, *q.v.*), 97

Zukám (catarrh), 35

Zwemer, Dr (author of *Arabia, the*
*Cradle of Islám*), 17, 65

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