On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt pdf

8MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC MEDICINEanswers, following the model of Galen’s Ars parva.26 His main work,Questions on Medicine for Scholars (al-Masأ¤’ilfi I-tibb lil-muta ‘allim7n), 27 wasan introduction to Galenic teaching set forth in this didactic style andwas widely read by medical students.In the span of about two hundred years—from the time of Hunaynuntil the early eleventh century A.D.—much of the Greek philosophicand scientific literature was rendered into Arabic. The translationswere introduced primarily because of the need for practically usefulsciences. 28 The medical literature, along with the astrological andalchemical, formed an early and significant part of the translations.29Although this massive translation of Greek works had been preceded byearlier translations from before the Arab conquests, mainly into Syriac,the later activity was remarkable for its scope, quality, and wide dis-semination. Indeed, this cultural transference seems to represent, as S.Pines has asserted, “the earliest large-scale attempt known in history totake over from an alien civilization its sciences and techniques regardedas universally valid. “30Thanks to the translation of classical works as well as to numeroussummaries and commentaries, the doctors of the Islamic era had avail-able every work by Hippocrates and Galen that was still being read inthe Greek centers of learning during the seventh to ninth centuriesA.D. 31 Subsequently, many of these Arabic translations, augmented bythe significant additions of Arabic authors, were translated into Latinfrom the late eleventh century A.D. and had a profound effect on theintellectual life of Europe in the High Middle Ages.32 The Latin26Strohmaier (E12, 3:580) points out that this kind of literature was very common in the biblicalexegesis of the Nestorian church at this time.21See the edition of Paul Ghalioungai, Cairo, 1980.28Pines, “Philosophy,” p. 784. The Muslims were indifferent, generally, to the nonscientificliterature of antiquity, so that a wide range ofGraeco-Roman belles lettres were not translated intoArabic. 9See the account of this cultural transference in Ullmann, Islamic Medicine, pp. 7—40, and morefully in his MI, pp. 25— 107; concerning Ibn Ridwأ¤n specifically, see Joseph Schacht, “أœber denHellenismus in Baghdad und Cairo im II. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlأ¤ndischenGesellschaft 90 (1936):526—545, and Schacht and Meyerhof, pp. 7—12. For a succinct account ofmedieval views about the origin of Greek medicine and its transmission to Arabic culture, seeMeyerhof, “Sultan Saladin’s Physician,” pp. 169—178.30Pines, “Philosophy,” p. 782.31E12, s.v. “Djأ¤linus” (R. Walzer).320ne might, perhaps, interpret the evolution of modern Islamic society in terms of the transmis-sion, or forceful interjection, of this scientific tradition once again back into Islamic culture,beginning in the nineteenth century.