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Young World
WORLD OF SCIENCE
Arabs and medicine
DR. T. V. PADMA
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Arabic physicians were among the best in the ancient world.
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Photo: AP
In the ancient world: The best physicians.
Until the 19th century, Islamic medicine and Arabic medical texts were studied as part of a physician’s curriculum in the Occident. That’s because Arabic physicians were among the best in the ancient world.
Doctors were highly respected in the Muslim world, so much so that sages as well as physicians were accorded the term “hakim”. Many ancient Arabic doctors were in fact physicians as well as philosophers. Muslim scholars often even wrote poems about medical subjects. The Arabic scholar al-Mutanabbi wrote a poem about fever after an attack when in Europe!
Two schools
The Arabs began a tradition of medicine that built on information they had gathered from the Indians, the Persians and the Greeks. There were two main schools of Greek medicine: that of Hippocrates, which was based on observation and sought concrete causes for physical ailments; and that of Galen, which was more philosophical and theoretical. The Persians and Indians also had a great store of medical knowledge and experiences as well as highly developed pharmacological practices and had written tomes recording their theories.
Jundishapur, an ancient Persian city, became the Arabic meeting ground in which Persian, Indian and Greek ideas of medicine were assimilated and in doing so created a vast technical vocabulary of medical terms.
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