Questions and Answers for Physicians: A Medieval Arabic Study Manual by Abd al-Aziz Al-Sulami (review)

In his Medicinalia Arabica (1966), Albert Dietrich drew the attention of the scholarly community to a work entitled Intelligent Examination of All Physicians (Imtihān al-alibbā' li-kāffat al-atibbā') by "Abd al-"Azīz al-Sulamī (ca. 1155–1208 CE). Gary Leiser now presents an edition and translation of this text, thereby bringing to a close a project that he and the late Noury al-Khaledy began more than twenty-five years ago. Al-Sulamī, hailing from a prominent Damascene family, practiced medicine in the Nu\rī hospital, and later (around 1200) was appointed chief physician in Cairo by the vizier al-S≥ah≥ib, to whom he dedicated the treatise under review. It consists of a short introduction followed by ten chapters, each containing twenty questions on a variety of subjects: sphygmology, urology, pyretology, symptomatology, simple drugs, ophthalmology, surgery, bonesetting, and fundamental medical theory. Each question is followed by an answer, mostly taken from the standard Arabic medical works of the time such as Ibn Sīnā's Qānun and al-Magusī's Kitāb al-Malakī, and from popular Greek medical works by Galen and Hippocrates. The difficulty of the questions varies greatly: some require only brief and rather elementary answers, while others call for long and detailed replies, such as a list of nearly ninety drugs.

The volume is composed of a preface by Leiser, containing a eulogy of Noury al-Khaledy (who died in 1995); an introduction, which is a revised version of an article by the two authors published in Turkish in 1987; the translation; a bibliography; an index; and, starting from the back of the book in a separate Arabic pagination, the edition of the Arabic text, followed by a list of variant readings. The introduction addresses the fascinating and fundamental question of how this treatise was used and for whom it was written. Leiser suggests that it was neither a catalog of questions employed to test or certify medical students or practitioners, nor a purely didactical tool, but rather a "'crib book' or crude syllabus" (p. 11). He states (p. 1) that this treatise is "the oldest apparent Islamic medical examination to come to light," and he rightly associates it with the "question and answer" genre, best exemplified by Hunain Ibn Ishāq's Medical Questions.

However, Leiser does not fully explore the relationship between al-Sulamī's work and the many other treatises or chapters in deontological works entitled Examination of the Physician (mihnatimtihan al-tabīb), beginning with Galen and continuing in the Arabic medical tradition—for instance, with al-Razī (d. 925) and Sa"id ibn al-Hasan (d. 1072). It is especially unfortunate that the latter is not mentioned here at all, for his chapter "On the Examination of the Physician and What Medical Questions to Ask" (Fī imtihan al-tabīb wa-su'alihī"an masa'il tibbīya), readily available in Otto Spies's edition and Schah E. Taschkandi's translation (both 1968), is of particular interest, because it contains questions that seem much more suitable for vetting medical students and practitioners than those contained in al-Sulamī.

Regrettably, this is not the only important omission. The bibliography contains few items published after the 1980s (Lawrence I. Conrad's works being a notable exception), and this disregard for more recent scholarship has led to some oddities. For instance, on the subject of materia medica, Leiser fails to use the ground-breaking studies by Albert Dietrich and Manfred Ullmann; his many notes on this topic, referencing outdated literature from the 1960s, are therefore often superfluous, and not infrequently incorrect. Leiser traced a number of the...