Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

j^DICINE IN MUSLIM SPAIN
The science of medicine and the art of surgery, the best
• |ca to a nation’s genius, were developed by the Muslims to the
i jest degree. Medicine had undoubtedly attained a high degree of
Alienee among the Greeks, but the Arabs carried it far beyond
je in which their predecessors had left it and brought it close to
tK modern standard. The Muslims made research for several
Buries. The study of medical substances, the idea of which struck
j-yscorides in the Alexandrian school, is in its scientific form, a
•jtion of the Arabs. They invented chemical pharmacy and were
^,, first founders of those institutions which are now called
\V
^.pensanes.
When, by the eleventh century, Islamic science had begun to
Jine in the Near East, its golden period was just beginning in the
s.,(st, that is, in Morocco and Spain. In the Maghrib too, to be a great
,,;tor usually meant being a cabinet minister or the personal adviser
the ruling prince as well. A famous physician at the court of the
, I he 1 egacy of Muslim Spam. P 952.
Literary & Scientific Development in Muslim Spain 651
Moroccan Almohades was Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar). His, ’’Facilities of Treatment” (al Taysir) different from the usual compendia and encyclopedias so beloved by Muslim doctors in that it was based chiefly on its author’s personal clinical experiences. It was yet one more of the numerous books by Arab doctors destined to enjoy great popularity among their European colleagues.
The most outstanding name in medicine in western Arabism was that of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), the great Aristotelian philosopher, who, as we already know, held various important posts under several Almohades kings. Among his books on medicine, pride of place goes to his, ”General Rules of Medicine” (Kulliyyat fit Tibb). In it, unlike so many of his colleagues, he did not give mere summaries of Greek and Arab medical knowledge but compared and analyzed the two, collating the work of such Muslims as Razi and Ibn Zuhr with that of Galen and Hippocrates. It was western Arabism that gave the world the most concrete affirmation of the doctrine of the contagious character of disease. The immediate cause for that discovery was provided by the great plague that ravaged the world in the fourteenth century. Having started in India in 1332, the plague gradually reached eastern Russia at its one end, and then spread across Syria and Constantinople to southern Europe and finally, in 1338, Spain in the south and England in the north. Throughout Europe the plague was regarded merely as an act of Gqd, even the scholars remaining incomplete ignorance of the fact that it was caused by contagion, carried by rats and fleas. (A famous description of the plague is contained in Boccaccio’s introduction to his Decameron.)
Whereas in most countries the plague produced a spate of pious tracts reeking with childish theology and rampant superstitions the chief causes of the plague were said to be either the Jews or volcanic eruptions or the birth of a calf with two heads-two Moorish doctors wrote treatises based entirely on scientific observation. They were Ibn al Khatib of Granada (1313-1374), equally famous as a historian, statesman and author, and Ibn Khatima (1323-1369), a doctor, poet and historian.
Ibn Khatib was the author of a number of distinguished historical works dealing chiefly with various aspects of Spanish and Moroccan history. He also wrote books on travel and literary essays, and he became famous for the elegance of his style and his linguistic innovations. During most of his life he was a wazir at the famous court of the Nasnds at the Alhamra in Granada. From a scientific

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Political and Cultural History ofhlam

point of view, his most important work is his treatise, ”On the Plague.” remarkable for its courage and for its convincing argumentation in defense of the idea of contagion. For indeed it required courage for a Muslim to oppose himself to views not merely held by the whole of his own community but sanctified by the Hadith, that is the Traditions concerning the life and the sayings of the Prophet (PBUH). Yet in propounding his medical theories, Ibn Khatib contradicted the Hadith. It must be a principle, he wrote, that a proof taken from the Traditions has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the perception of the senses. Ibn Khatib gave proof of a like independence of mind and moral courage in writing his other medical treatise, ’’Amal Man Tabba Liman Habba,” dedicated to one of the Merinid kings of Morocco. For besides dealing with general problems of medicine, he tackled, in a final chapter, matters as controversial as abortion (which he approved of in cases where the life of the potential mother might be endangered); the advocacy of aphrodisiacs for national and social reasons and the use of wine for medical purposes.
Ibn Khatib also wrote a biography of his colleague Ibn Khatima whose treatise on the plague is even more significant than his own. Ibn Khatima wrote it in 1349 when the Black Death was at its height in Almeria in Spain where he lived. His findings were based entirely on his own observations. We find in his treatise then revolutionary sentence, the result of my long experience is that if a person comes into contact with a patient, he is immediately attacked by the disease with the same symptoms and the second patient likewise transmits the disease. Ibn Khatima does not disdain a preoccupation with the theological aspects of the plague, but la>s most of his emphasis on the contagious nature of the disease, and on therapeutics and prophylaxy.
Neither of the two great doctors produced a water tight systematic definition of contagion. Scientific knowledge was not sufficiently advanced for that, and another two hundred years were to elapse before Gerolamo Fracastoro’s work De Contagione could appear. In fact, the decisive statement on the true nature of infection was not to be made until modern times with Pasteur’s bacteriological discoveries. Nevertheless, Ibn Khatib and Ibn Khatima were the first to give clinical accounts of contagion, thus revolutionizing the medical conceptions of the time.
Literary & Scientific Development in Muslim Spam 653
In Europe, throughout the early Middle Ages, medicine was practised mainly either by quacks or by some devoted but not very learned monks. During the same period, Islam was producing some of history’s most distinguished theoreticians and practitioners in the medical craft. In Muslim countries the profession of a doctor was deemed to be among the most honourable ones and its practitioners enjoyed high social standing. Numerous accounts have been preserved of fabulous fees paid to doctors for their services. As we should expect, the Muslims developed at quite an early date the institution of hospitals. Baghdad already had its first hospital during the reign of Harun, that is, in the very first years of the ninth century. During that century several new hospitals were added. Cairo’s first hospital, too, dates from the ninth century. By the eleventh century we find a number of travelling hospitals in various parts of the Muslim world.
Even the earliest Islamic hospitals were divided into wards for men and wards for women, each with its own dispensary. Some of them maintained their own gardens in which herbs and medicinal plants were cultivated. The larger hospitals would contain a medical school in which the prospective doctors might obtain their diploma. Not only doctors but also druggists and barbers who performed certain surgical operations were subject to official inspection.
Zahrawi
The greatest surgeon of the Arabs, who never produced many surgeons, was Abu-al-Qasim Khalaf ibn-’Abbas al-Zahrawi; the court physician of al-Hakam II. His claim to distinction rests on a treatise al-Tasrif li-Man ’Ajaz ’an al-Ta’alif (an aid to him who is not equal to the large treatises), which in its last section sums up the surgical knowledge of his time. The work introduces or emphasizes such new ideas as cauterization of wounds, crushing a stone inside the bladder and the necessity of vivisection and dissection. This surgical part was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona and various editions were published at Venice in 1497, at Basel in 1541 and at Oxford in 1778. It held its place for centuries as the manual of surgery in Salerno, Montpellier and other early schools of medicine. It contained illustrations of instruments which influenced other Arab authors and helped lay the foundations of surgery in Europe. A colleague of al-Zahrawi was Hasday bin-Shaprut, the Jewish minister and physician who translated into Arabic, with the collaboration of a Byzantine monk Nicholas, the splendid illustrated manuscript of the

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Political and Cultural History of Islam
Materia Medica of Dioscorides, which had been sent as a diplomatic present to Abdur Rahman in from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII.