Islamic Medicine

by Manfred Ullmann

Book Overview

This highly readable survey describes the development of Islamic medicine and its influence on Western medical thought.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0748609075
• ISBN13: 9780748609079
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A Basic Introduction

In this short book (only 114 pages of text, with a few illustrations) Manfred Ullmann, one of the world's leading experts on the scientific literature of the Arabic-speaking world in the medieval period, offers an introduction to Arabic-language writings about medicine. After a short discussion of pre-Islamic medical practices in the Arabian peninsula, Ullmann focuses on the impact of the translation of Greek medical writings into Arabic, sometimes directly from Greek, sometimes via Syriac or Persian intermediaries. He then proceeds to treat physiology, anatomy, pathology, transmission of diseases and the plague, dietetics and pharmacology, and the relation between medicine and magic in a few short chapters. His chief guide is *Al-Kitab al-Malaki* of Majusi, who died between 982 and 995. It must have been a despairing task to write this book. The writings left behind by medieval Arab physicians form an enormous corpus, much of which has been printed in atrocious, unreliable editions, or remains only in manuscript. In choosing Majusi as his guide, Ullmann reduced the task to manageable proportions. But he thereby also sacrificed much. Majusi depended heavily on the works of Galen, and aimed to produce a comprehensive handbook; he thus represents the chief, purely "scientific" branch of Islamic medicine. Competing traditions receive short shrift, and there is virtually nothing about the actual practice of medicine (only a handful of cases histories -- the feature that makes the Hippokratic *Epidemics* still such compelling reading today -- appear in connection with treatment of the plague) or about medicine in its social and cultural context. These omissions result also in part from Ullmann's slightly old-fashioned approach, evident again in his comparisons of medieval medical knowledge with our own. Nor does Ullmann have much to say about the contribution of Persian, Egyptian, or Indian medical traditions and practices to Islamic medicine.If these deficiencies are borne in mind, however, *Islamic Medicine* can still provide a solid, though somewhat out-of-date (the book was first published in 1978), introduction to the academic and scientific tradition in Islamic medical writing.