Islamic Medicine : New,
[A5] Paperback - 152 pages,
by Mannfred Ullman,
Transl. by Dr. Jean Montgomery Watt,
Publ. by New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys.
RRP: £29.99
Description :
This highly readable survey describes the development of Islamic medicine and its influence on Western medical thought. It explains the main features of Islamic medicine: its system of human physiology; its ideas about the nature of disease; its rules for diet and the use of drugs; and its relationship with astrology and the occult.
Extract from the Introduction :
The book that I here give to the public bears the title Islamic Medicine. It is the account of a medical system which was introduced into Arab countries in the ninth century C.E. and was practised throughout the Middle Ages and right up to modern times. This system is widely known under the term ‘Arabian Medicine’. But many doctors, among them some of the most outstanding like ar-Razi (Rhazes), al-MajusI (Haly Abbas) and Ibn-Slna (Avicenna), were Persians, not Arabs. To be sure, they wrote their scientific works chiefly in Arabic.
Extract from the Book :
" The science of medicine’, al-Majusi writes,¹ ‘can be divided into three parts. The first is the science of the “natural things”, the second the science of the “non-natural things”, the third the science of the “extra-natural things”.
By ‘natural things’ is meant the elements, the temperament, the humours, the faculties, the pneumata, etc., in fact, everything that is the subject of physiology, as we tried to sketch it in the fourth chapter. The ‘extra-natural things’ are the illnesses, their causes and their symptoms. We have spoken about these in the chapter on pathology. There remain the ‘nonnatural things’, a vast... "
Dr. Manfred Ullmann studied Arabic, Semitic, and Greek Studies at the Universities of Tübingen and Hamburg. He received his doctorate in Tübingen in 1959 and his habilitation there in 1965. In 1970, he was appointed adjunct professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen. Ullmann is a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities (since 1984) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (since 1990), and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (since 2017).
Ullmann's research concerns the grammar of Arabic (especially its syntax), lexicon, motifs and development of Arabic literature, and the reception and transmission of Greek writings (Menander Sentences, medicine, natural sciences) in Arabic as well as in Islam. In his main work, the Arabic-German/English Dictionary of Classical Arabic (WKAS), the historical development of the Arabic vocabulary for the initial letters Kāf and Lām is elaborated on the basis of well over one hundred thousand sources according to strict lexicographical principles, and the diverse use of the classical Arabic language is comprehensively presented.
Also see Science and Medicine,
More Islamic History.
Dimensions : 21.5 x 14cm
