AIn the Middle Ages, the Arabs, having conserved the science of Antiquity and the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen, were the pioneers of medical research. In particular, they took up the theory of humours, according to which illness is the result of imbalances between four bodily fluids - blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or choler) and black bile (or melancholy) - which govern the body and the personality. Treatments prescribed under this system aimed to re-establish the initial balance, through medication and diet.
Arab doctors developed these teachings, leaning on a logical conception of ailments and a methodical approach. Thus they listed and described symptoms, improved the art of diagnosis and clinical practice, and laid down the basis of a professional code of conduct.
Their contributions to medical science were legion, encouraged by the construction of hospitals (in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Samarkand and elsewhere), each under the command of a master. The basic principles of hygiene (asepsis, and the isolation of contagious cases) were discovered, at a time when Europe believed that leprosy and the plague could be transmitted by sight, and a very wide range of medications was developed thanks in part to wide-ranging international trade, be it by caravan or by sea. Countless plants, animal extracts and minerals were used in plasters, unguents, cataplasms and tablets.
Avicenna's famous Canon (or Qanun) was a monumental medical encyclopaedia, which presented and categorised almost 800 remedies. European medical vocabulary to this day bears traces of the pharmacological inventiveness of the Arabs, in the form of words with Arabic etymologies such as 'alcohol', 'benzine', 'benjoin', 'elixir', 'soda', 'talc', 'amber', 'senna' and so on.
Avicenna (the Latinised form of the Arabic name Ibn Sina) was of course the outstanding figure in medieval Arab medicine. Born in 980 CE, Avicenna began to practice medicine at the age of 16. It is to him that we owe the first descriptions of meningitis and pleurisy, as well as over 100 medical and philosophical works.
His Canon was translated into Latin and published in Europe for the first time in 1473. Less than a hundred years later, it had already run to 36 editions.
|