It is said that in actual practice Avenzoar, who was a man of some wealth, confined himself to consultation work. He considered it beneath the dignity of a physician to prepare drugs, to apply leeches, or to perform certain surgical operations--as, for example, lithotomy; but Le Clerc seems disposed to believe that Avenzoar did not adopt this view until after he had become somewhat celebrated and had accumulated a fortune. Neuburger ranks him next to Rhazes as a clinical observer and a practitioner of sound common sense, and he speaks of his great medical work, the Teïssir, as a treatise that abounds in most interesting histories of cases of disease. Among these will be found the account of an attack of mediastinitis which occurred in his own person, and which ended in suppuration that found a vent for its products by way of one of the bronchi.[51] As this disease is of rare occurrence, and as Freind’s account of the attack is presumably a translation of the original report in Arabic made by Avenzoar, its reproduction here may be interesting. I shall take the liberty of modernizing the text very slightly and of abbreviating it in one or two places. I felt some pain in the region of the mediastinum (the membrane which divides the thorax in the middle) while I was on a journey. As it increased a cough developed, and I observed that my pulse was very hard and that I had an acute fever. On the fourth night I took away a pint of blood, but this gave me very little relief. Being obliged to travel all day I was much fatigued when I retired at night, and I fell asleep. During my sleep the bandage on the arm came off, and when I awoke I found the bed deluged with blood and my strength greatly exhausted. The next day I began to cough up a sanious matter, and my mind wandered at times. Gradually all the symptoms subsided and I recovered my health. Although I partook of large quantities of barley water, I believe that my recovery was not due to this, but rather to the great loss of blood which I had experienced. Freind adds that “Avenzoar not only takes notice of an abscess in the mediastinum, but in the pericardium likewise; which I don’t find had been described or even observed by any of the Greeks or Arabians: and there is no doubt but this membrane and the mediastinum to which it is contiguous, are subject, as well as the pleura and lungs, to an inflammation.” It is one of the distinguishing features of Avenzoar’s character that, in his writings, he does not hesitate to differ from his predecessors whenever he believes that their views are erroneous.