INTRODUCTION: MEDICINE IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM

At the beginning of the seventh century, the new religion of Islam was revealed to the prophet Muḥammad who subsequently succeeded in uniting the Bedouin tribes of the Arab peninsula under its banner. After his death in 632, his successors set out to conquer the neighboring countries and to convert their peoples to the Islamic faith. Approximately a century later, the Arab rule extended from the Pyrenees to the Indus. The syncretistic civilization that developed in this vast area was dominated by the religion and language of the ruling Arabs, but also integrated manifold traditions of the local populations, among them the highly developed Hellenistic sciences, as they were cultivated in the Near East before the advent of Islam. In the course of large-scale efforts to arabicize the ancient scientific heritage, almost the entire medical literature of the Greeks that had survived so far, notably the works of Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 216) and a selection of the Hippocratic Corpus, was translated into Arabic and thus became the basis of “professional” medicine in Islam. Furthermore, the doctors of Islam adopted from the Alexandrian school of late antiquity the “Galenic system,” a systematic outline of the concepts of humoral medicine as exposed in the huge oeuvre of Galen. This system enabled Islamic physicians to assimilate the rich corpus of knowledge accumulated by their predecessors and organize it into those clearly arranged handbooks, which constitute one of the major accomplishments of medieval Islam.