Medieval Islamic Medicine (review)

Those who are interested in the history of Islamic medicine will no doubt be familiar with Manfred Ullmann’s small classic Islamic Medicine, which was published in 1978 in the same book series. They will also know that progress in the study of medieval Islamic medicine is made only at a relatively slow pace and hence wonder whether revisiting the subject at this point in time is a worthwhile exercise. I certainly did when I saw the book under review first advertised. My doubts, however, were soon dispelled. Pormann and Savage-Smith are not only dealing with some important aspects of medieval Islamic medicine that Ullmann excluded from his earlier study; they are also offering a different, somewhat less Grecophile and thus more balanced perspective on other aspects of the topic. The authors’ declared intention “not to replace . . . , but to succeed and supplement [Ullmann’s volume]” (p. 4) is therefore as much an understatement of their actual achievement as it is an acknowledgment that there naturally remain areas with regard to which Ullmann’s volume retains its validity (namely the theoretical sections on physiology, anatomy, dietetics, and pharmaceutics). English-speaking readers are now in the fortunate position of having at their disposal two excellent and concise surveys of the subject that complement and modify each other most propitiously.

Pormann and Savage-Smith’s book, then, is divided into six main chapters: chapter 1, “The Emergence of Islamic Medicine,” deals with the origins and the rise of Islamic medicine, containing sections on pre-Islamic, Greek, Syrian, Persian, Indian, and Chinese medical theories as well as an instructive account of the impact of the translation movement on the development of a medical terminology in Arabic; chapter 2, “Medical Theory,” deals with the theoretical framework of Islamic medicine and the holistic paradigm that constituted medical reality in those days, including sections on the structure and function of the body, regimen, diet, and drug therapy, diagnosis and prognosis, classification of diseases, clinical specialties, and prophetic medicine; chapter 3, “Physicians and Society,” deals with the role and social status of the physician and with the places of medical practice, featuring sections on medical education and ethics, charlatans, female doctors, markets, hospitals, and public health care; chapter 4, “Practice,” which is in my opinion the strongest chapter in the book, deals with the question of which therapeutic procedures were actually employed by medieval physicians and which remedies they really used, emphasizing the obvious but often overlooked discrepancy between the expositions of scholastic medicine and everyday medical practice; chapter 5, “Popular Medicine,” deals with the magical, folkloric, and religious aspects of Islamic medicine as documented both by texts and artifacts; and chapter 6, “Afterlife,” deals with the eventual transmission of Islamic medicine to Europe and its survival in general, with short sections on Byzantine and Latin translations from Arabic, the crusades, the Renaissance, the Ottoman and Safavid empires, and the so-called Unani medicine as it is still practiced today on the Indian subcontinent.

Each chapter is followed by a useful paragraph of “Suggested [further] Reading” and also by a list of “Notes” to the preceding text (why, in an age of sophisticated word processing, do these learned remarks not appear much more conveniently as footnotes?). The book concludes with an extensive bibliography; a chronology of relevant historical events both in the Muslim East and the Latin West; an index of names and works; and a general index. The book also contains twenty-two illustrations, among them a very clever diagram showing at a glance the complex structure of the Islamic medico-philosophical system (p. 43).