The medical knowledge and medical treatment of the Arabs deserve some notice. The Arabs think themselves always ailing and never fail to consult a _hakim_ or doctor when there is opportunity. The hakeem is supposed to know both their malady and its cure by simple observation; to tell the physician for what cause they seek him would be an insult to his wisdom and for him to ask them settles the matter that he is not a true hakeem. The common diseases of Arabia are the following, according to Arab nomenclature:—_El Kibd_, _i. e._, the liver, or all visceral infirmities; _er rihh_, literally, “the wind,” or rheumatics and neuralgia; _humma_, fevers; _tahāl_ or ague-cake; _el-hasa_ or stone; ophthalmia; “fascination” or hysterics, (as when they say a man has a jinn or a child has been looked at by the evil-eye); leprosy, phthisis, dropsy, stranguria, ulcers and senile itch. For any and all of these ailments, beside others not so common, yet sometimes epidemic like smallpox and cholera, the Arabs seek a hakeem. All medicine, save amulets, charms and exorcisms, is called _dawa_. Their pharmacopia is not large but quite remarkable; in addition to such simple herbs of the desert as their hareem collect and dry they use in grave emergencies that which is harām (forbidden) and unclean. Patients have come to me for a small piece of swine’s flesh (which they suppose all Christians eat) to cure one in desperate straits. Doughty tells how among the Bedouins they give the sick to eat of the carrion-eagle and even seethe asses’ dung for a potion. _Kei_ or actual cautery is a favorite cure for all sorts of diseases; so also is _khelal_ or perforating the skin surface with a red-hot iron and then passing a thread through the hole to facilitate suppuration. Scarcely one Arab in a hundred who has not some _kei_-marks on his body; even infants are burned most cruelly in this way to relieve diseases of childhood. Where _kei_ fails they have resource to words written on paper either from the Koran, or, by law of contraries, words of evil, sinister import. These the patient “takes” either by swallowing them, paper and all, or by drinking the ink-water in which the writing is washed off. Blood-letting is also a sovereign remedy for many troubles. The Arab barber is at once a phlebotomist, cauterizer, and dentist. His implements—one can hardly call them instruments—are very crude and he uses them with some skill but without any mercy. Going to the proper place in any large Arab town you may always see a row of men squatting down with bent back to be bled; cupping and scarifying are the two methods most in vogue, although some are quite clever in opening a vein. The science of medicine in the towns is not much in advance of that of the desert—more book-talk but even less natural intelligence. A disease to be at all respectable must be connected with one of the four temperaments or “humors of Hippocrates.”