The Origin and Growth of the Healing Art: A Popular History of Medicine in All Ages and CountriesBerdoe, Edward
History
The Origin and Growth of the Healing Art: A Popular History of Medicine in All Ages and Countries
Berdoe, Edward
Medicine -- History
The physicians of Myddvai recognised five kinds of fevers; viz.,
latent, intermittent, ephemeral, inflammatory, and typhus. The doctor’s
“three master difficulties” were a wounded lung, a wounded mammary
gland, and a wounded knee joint. “There are three bones which will
never unite when broken—a tooth, the knee pan, and the os frontis.”
CHAPTER II.
MOHAMMEDAN MEDICINE.
Sources of Arabian Learning.—Influence of Greek and Hindu
Literature.—The Nestorians.—Baghdad and its Colleges.—The Moors
in Spain.—The Mosque Schools.—Arabian Inventions and Services to
Literature.—The great Arab Physicians.—Serapion, Rhazes, Ali Abbas,
Avicenna, Albucasis, and Averroes.
At the time of the incursions of the barbarians of the North, when
Spain, the South of France, Italy, and North Africa, with their
adjacent islands, were ravaged by these hordes, multitudes of those
who could escape so far found a refuge in the East; and there is good
reason for supposing that by such means a vast store of the accumulated
knowledge of civilized Europe found its way to Eastern lands. Science
in its turn has come back to us through the Saracens, who afterwards
invaded Southern Europe.[678]
It is not correct to speak of the Arabians or the Saracens as the
source of the culture which is known as Arabian and Saracenic. The
magnificent civilization of the Greek world fell to pieces like a noble
but ruined temple, and its precious relics went to form a score of
other civilizations which ultimately arose from its ruins. It was not
the Semitic peoples of Arabia which restored the philosophy and science
of the decayed Græco-Roman world, it was the Persians, the Greeks of
Asia Minor, the people of Alexandria, and the cultured Eastern nations,
generally, which having been subdued by the Arabs, at once began to
impart to their conquerors the culture which they lacked. The ignorant
followers of the Prophet who burned the Alexandrian Library knew not
what they did; the time was to come when Greek culture was to reach
them partly from the city whose literary treasures they had destroyed,
and partly through Syrian and Persian influences. By these roads came
the medical sciences to the Saracens. The second library of Alexandria,
consisting of 700,000 volumes, was destroyed by them, A.D. 642; but
we must conclude that many medical and other scientific works were
preserved, as the Jews and the Nestorians (banished from Constantinople
to Asia) first made the Arabians acquainted with Greek authors by
translating them into Syriac, whence they were in turn translated into
Arabic. Justinian I. (A.D. 529) banished the Platonists of Athens, when
Chosröes I., surnamed Nushirwan, or “the generous mind,” one of the
greatest monarchs of Persia, hospitably received them at his court.
He caused the best Greek, Latin, and Indian works to be translated
into Persian, and valued Græco-Roman medical science so highly that he
offered a suspension of hostilities for the single physician Tribunus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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