The Medicinal Use of Opium in Ninth-Century Baghdad (review)

In the history of Arabic science, the ninth century AD was arguably the most crucial period. It marked the height of the great translation movement, in the course of which many important scientific texts were translated into Arabic from the Greek and Sanskrit languages. It was then that the Abbasid Empire had reached its widest geographical extension, and all ways led to Baghdad. It was a formative period that laid the structural and contextual foundations of almost all later scientific endeavors in the Arab world, and this is no less true for the medical and pharmaceutical sciences. Selma Tibi's excellent book takes the reader right into the middle of these exciting times. As the title indicates, her book focuses on opium, and in particular on how and to what extent this drug was prescribed medicinally by physicians of ninth-century Baghdad. On the background outlined above, this is a most appropriate choice.

Though the opium poppy was cultivated as a recreational drug already by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, whence it gradually spread eastward and westward, the first mention of its use as a medicinal drug is made in the Greek pharmacopoeia of the fifth century BC. It is therefore no surprise that Tibi's excursion into the medical history of opium rests largely on the Greco-Roman literary tradition as the paradigm of subsequent Arabic handlings of the drug (pp. 1–28). The bulk of the book is a thorough analysis of the medicinal use of opium as described in six "classic" medico-pharmacological writings from ninth-century Baghdad: al-Kindī's Dispensatory, Sābūr ibn Sahl's Small Dispensatory, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's Ten Treatises on the Eye, al-Ṭabarī's Paradise of Wisdom, pseudo-Thābit ibn Qurra's Treasure, and al-Rāzī's Continens (pp. 29–169). The majority of extracts gathered by Tibi from these sources are recipes, though some include general discussions of opium and other species of poppy.

Here the fact that Tibi is both a historian and a trained pharmacist shines through every page; it manifests itself most propitiously in her evaluation of the material, which she illustrates throughout by statistical tables. We learn from all this, inter alia, that opium was used for virtually all kinds of disorders and in combination with a great variety of ingredients, especially castoreum, frankincense, gum arabic, henbane(!), myrrh, nard, and saffron; that the amount of opium ingested in a single dose varied between 0.03g and 0.42g, depending on the individual patient; and that the recipes containing opium are, by and large, elaborations of Greek precursors (notably Dioscorides) (pp. 170–81). The book concludes with an annotated and therefore particularly useful glossary of materia medica (Arabic-English-Linnaean); glossaries of medical conditions, general terms, and weights and measures; reproductions of the quoted extracts in original Arabic script; and indices covering mainly proper nouns, place names, and book titles (pp. 189–314).

It speaks for the high quality of Tibi's work and reflects her exacting standards of scholarship that errors, which mar so many other books of this nature, are few and far between (e.g., p. 75 n. 125 lines 4–5 and passim: read lā mazdakhyānā, "invincible," a Syriac drug epithet; p. 190 lines 27–28: 'āqirqarḥā, "pyrethrum," is Aramaic 'eqor qarḥā, and has nothing to do with Sanskrit). If we had more such studies on key medicinal drugs, a "natural" history of Arabic pharmacy would seem a much less remote undertaking. This book, in any case, is a very fine contribution.