Medical Culture of Mohammedans

The Arabic medicine alone tended the lamp of the intellect in Europe during the Middle Ages. Filtered across the Pyrenees from Spain, Arabic culture was a stimulating force.

The great majority of the medical treatises of the classical period up to about 1000 AD were written on Arabic. During the first three or four centuries after the Hijra, Arabic was the scientific language all over the Islamic world.

The Arabians derived their knowledge of Greek medicine from Nestorians monks and many practical details from the Jews and their astrological conception from the Egyptians and from the east.

The translation of the Greek books into Arabic, either directly or through intermediate Syriac versions, was effected for the most part under the enlightened patronage of the early Abbasid Caliphs at Baghdad between the middle of the eight and ninth centuries.

The essential features of Arabians physicians training was that most had extensive knowledge of Mohammedan theology, Law, Philosophy, astronomy, astrology, other part of Arts, science and medicine.

The introduction of arithmetic alone was exciting, but Islam’s influence on medicine was deep and lasting.

Their diagnosis of internal diseases were founded upon from canons:
*The patients action
*His or her excreta
*The nature of the pain
*Its site
*Swelling
*Effluvia of the body; further information were cited from the fell of the hand, yellowness of the eye and bending of the back

Some four or five centuries later European seekers after knowledge, cut off from the original Greek sources, betook themselves with ever increasing enthusiasm to this Arabian presentation of the ancient learning and rehabilitated it in a Latin dress.

The transmission of Arabian science and medicine to the Occident began with the Crusades, though earlier a filtering of important knowledge in mathematics and astronomy had reached Southern and Middle Europe through Spain.
Medical Culture of Mohammedans