Medieval Islamic Medicine

From an Ottoman manuscript, two doctors
telling the pharmacist how to make
different medicines

It was during the Islamic empire that the first big scientific advances in medicine were made. The Islamic doctors began by collecting all the medical observations and logic of Hippocrates and his followers, and Galen, but they went on to much more practical observations and really managed to find some useful cures for some diseases.

Medieval Islamic doctors were especially good at treating eye infections and eye problems like cataracts.

One famous doctor was Ibn Riza (or Rhazes), who was from Persia (modern Iran). He was born about 850 AD, and he wrote a book about measles and smallpox. This is our first description of measles, and explains how it is different from smallpox. Ibn Riza also explained that a fever was not part of the illness, but the body's way of fighting the illness (even though Europeans at this time thought that fevers were caused by having too much blood, and they used to bleed people to cure the fever).

Another famous doctor was Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, who was born in Bukhara (modern Uzbekistan), about 980 AD. According to his autobiography, Ibn Sina worked hard as a child, and everyone thought he was very smart. By the time Ibn Sina was ten, he had memorized the whole Koran, as well as a lot of Islamic poetry.
When he was fourteen, he had learned everything the school had to teach, and his father had to get him a special tutor.
When Ibn Sina was sixteen, he decided to study medicine. He learned both from books and by visiting sick people. By the time he was 18 he was a doctor. He became known for being a great doctor, but a man who also loved to throw parties, dance and sing, drink wine, and kiss girls.
Ibn Sina wrote more than a hundred books in his life. The most famous was the "Canons of Medicine," which is an encyclopedia of diseases, naming their causes and their symptoms, and suggesting treatments. It was based on the work of Hippocrates and Galen, but Ibn Sina did not just repeat what people already knew. He wrote down his own new ideas too. For instance, he thought that tuberculosis was catching, even though most Europeans at that time thought it was not (but Ibn Sina was right).

Ibn Sina died at 58 in Persia, of some sort of stomach cramps, possibly cancer.

About 1150, Ibn Rushd, who was from Islamic Spain, wrote a medical encyclopedia, as well as commentaries on Aristotle and Plato.

Maimonides, who was Jewish and not a Muslim, was the sultan Saladin's doctor in the 1100's AD. Maimonides' book about medicine became very famous. It emphasized prevention - living a healthy life so you wouldn't get sick.

Another famous doctor from the Islamic Empire was called Ibn Nafis. He lived in Damascus, Syria, in the 1200's AD. Among other things, Ibn Nafis was the first scientist to describe how blood goes from your heart to your lungs to get air and then distributes the air all over your body. (The Roman doctor Galen had suggested some ideas, but Ibn Nafis showed that Galen's ideas were wrong).

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