Early Muslim Medicine and the Indian Context: A Reinterpretation
In: Medieval EncountersaDepartment of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel bInstitute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Morrice Hall, Room 319, 3485 McTavish Street, Montreal, Québec, Canada H3A 0E1 * Corresponding author, e-mail: shefer@post.tau.ac.il
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Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a remarkable shift in the way scholars study the field of sciences in Muslim societies. Up to the 1980s, research focused on Muslim scientists’ role as transmitters of science to the West, and as contributors to Western science. The Muslim world was commonly viewed as a link between ancient Greece and Latin Christendom, its scholars serving as translators of Greek treatises, and as preservers of Greek knowledge. Recently, the theme of Indian-Muslim cultural-scientific relations has attracted growing attention. Following this trend, we maintain that the eighth and ninth centuries reveal an interaction between Indian and Muslim medicine and physicians. Building on the past work of scholars such as Michael W. Dols and more recently Kevin van Bladel, we reinterpret medieval Arabic sources to reveal that the interest in Asian science was not a brief and untypical phenomenon that lacked long-lasting implications. By rereading Arabic chronicles and biographical dictionaries, we will portray how a rather brief contact between ʿAbbāsid Iraq and India proved to yield enduring influences. We will focus on two aspects of Muslim medical practice for demonstrating the Indian connection: the presence of Indian physicians in Baghdād in and around the ʿAbbāsid court, and the emergence of early Muslim hospitals.
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3
Scott Montgomery, Science in Translation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4.
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6
Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Euroasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 153, 413, n.76.
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Kim Plofker, Mathematics in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), Chapter 8, “Exchanges with the Islamic World,” 255-278.
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Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). The authors thank Professor Zvi Ben-Dor for referring them to this new study.
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Christopher I. Beckwith, Warriors of the Cloisters: The Central Asia Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
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Michael W. Dols, “The Origins of the Islamic Hospital: Myth and Reality,” Bulletein of the History of Medicine 61 (1987), 385.
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Kevin Van Bladel, “The Bactrian Background of the Barmakids,” in Islam and Tibet-Interactions along the Musk Routes, eds. Anna Akasoy, Charles Burnett and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (London: Ashgate, 2011), 43-88. We thank Dr. Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim for referring us to this paper when it was just published.
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17
See Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist (Muṣṭafā Muḥammad ed. Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijārīya al-Kubrā, 1929), 342 (for Manka), 378 (for Kanka). For an English version see Bayard Dodge (ed.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm: A Tenth Century Survey of Muslim Culture (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1970), 2: 589 fn. 69. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, ʿUyūn al-ʾAnbāʾ fī Ṭabaqat al-ʾAţibbā’ (Frankfurt: Ma‘hid Ta’rīḥ al-‘Ulūm al-Islāmiyya, August Müller, ed., 1995 rep.) contains an entry for Manka (p. 33) and one for Kanka (p. 32); Ibn al-Qifṭī, Jamāl al-Dīn Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. Yūsuf b. Ibrāhīm b. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid al-Shaybānī, Ikhbār al-ʿUlamāʾ bi-Akhbār al-Ḥukamāʾ, J. Lippert, ed. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1903), 265-267. The Ayyūbid author Al-Qifṭī, another important biographer of physicians, mentions Kanka only, with very little biographical information. Most of the biography is dedicated to an anecdote discussing the characteristics of kings of different nations.
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D. Sourdel, “Bukhtīshūʿ,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online, 2013. Available online at http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/bukhtishu-SIM_151430 (accessed 30 March 2013).
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See, for example, Peter Pormann, “Medical Methodology and Hospital Practice: The Case of Tenth-century Baghdad,” in In the Age of al-Farabi: Arabic Philosophy in the 4th/10th Century, ed. P. Adamson (Warburg Institute Colloquia 12) (London: Warburg Institute, 2008), 95-118; idem, “Islamic Hospitals in the time of al-Muqtadir,” in Abbasid Studies II: Occasional Papers of the School of ʿAbbasid Studies, Leuven, 28 June-1 July 2004, ed. J. Nawas, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 177 (Leuven; Dudley, Mass.: Peeters, 2010), 337-831. The authors wish to thank Professor Pormann for allowing them to read the paper prior to its publication. See also Pormann and Savage-Smith, 96, 101, 110-111; Dols, “The Origins of the Islamic Hospital,” 382.
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Lawrence Conrad, “Did al-Walīd Found the First Islamic Hospital?,” Aram, 6 (1994), 236.
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Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Bagdad and Early ’Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1998).
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See Dols, “The Origins of the Islamic Hospital,” 379; Yasser Tabbaa, “The Functional Aspects of Medieval Islamic Hospitals,” in Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, eds. Michael Bonner, Mine Ener and Amy Singer (New York, NY: State University of New-York Press, 2003), 98.
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Cyril Elgood, A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from Earliest Times until the Year 1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 70-71.
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Dols, “The Origins of the Islamic Hospital,” 376; Pormann and Savage-Smith, 20-21.
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Michael Dols, “Insanity in Byzantine and Islamic Medicine,” Dumberton Oaks Papers (Symposium on Byzantine Medicine) 38 (1984), 142.
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W. Ebermann, “Bericht ueber die Arabischen Studien in Russland Waehrend der Jahre 1921-1927,” Islamica, 4 (1930), 147.
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W. Barthold and D. Sourdel, “al-Barāmika,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition. Brill Online, 2013. Available online at http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-baramika-COM_0099 (accessed 30 March 2013).
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Richard W. Bulliet, “Naw Bahār and the Survival of Iranian Buddhism,” Iran 14 (1976), 140-145.
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Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India, Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38. For the relation between monastic life and medicine, see Chapter 3, esp. pp. 38-49.
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58
Zysk, 44; P.V. Sharma, “Travelers accounts,” in History of Medicine in India, from Antiquity to 1000 A.D., ed. Priya Sharma (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1992), 155-160. See also A.L. Basham, “The Practice of Medicine in Ancient and Medieval India,” in Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study, ed. Charles Leslie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 34.
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Basham, “The Practice of Medicine in Ancient and Medieval India,” 33-35.
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R.E. Emmerick, “Ravigupta’s Siddhasāra in Arabic,” in Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Vorderen Orients, eds. Hans R. Roemer und Albrecht Noth (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 28-31; Manfred Ullmann, Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), 18-19; van Bladel, 77. Muslim pharmacopeia in turn enriched the Indian materia medica. See, for example, P.V. Sharma, “Contributions of Śārngadhara in the Field of Materia Medica and Pharmacy,” Indian Journal of History of Science 16 (1981), 3-10; D.K.S Chauhan, “Contribution of Medieval India to Āyurvedic Materia Medica,” Indian Journal of History of Science 16 (1981), 17-21.
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Volker Roelcke, “Medical Thought in Ancient Greek and India: Comments on the Relation between Social Organisation and Medical Ideology,” Cambridge Anthropology 12 (1987), 41-66.
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Cheng Yunü, “Buddhism and the Medical Treatment of Women in the Ming Dynasty: A Research Note,” Nan Nü 10 (2008), 279-303.
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Suman Singh and and Seema Dwivedi, “Practice of Medicine in the Ramayana Age,” Asian Agri-History, 10 (2006), 331-334; Dominik Wujastyk, “The Science of Medicine,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 393-401.
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Early Muslim Medicine and the Indian Context: A Reinterpretation
In: Medieval EncountersaDepartment of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel bInstitute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Morrice Hall, Room 319, 3485 McTavish Street, Montreal, Québec, Canada H3A 0E1 * Corresponding author, e-mail: shefer@post.tau.ac.il
Search for other papers by M. Shefer-Mossensohn in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Search for other papers by K. Abou Hershkovitz in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
The past few decades have witnessed a remarkable shift in the way scholars study the field of sciences in Muslim societies. Up to the 1980s, research focused on Muslim scientists’ role as transmitters of science to the West, and as contributors to Western science. The Muslim world was commonly viewed as a link between ancient Greece and Latin Christendom, its scholars serving as translators of Greek treatises, and as preservers of Greek knowledge. Recently, the theme of Indian-Muslim cultural-scientific relations has attracted growing attention. Following this trend, we maintain that the eighth and ninth centuries reveal an interaction between Indian and Muslim medicine and physicians. Building on the past work of scholars such as Michael W. Dols and more recently Kevin van Bladel, we reinterpret medieval Arabic sources to reveal that the interest in Asian science was not a brief and untypical phenomenon that lacked long-lasting implications. By rereading Arabic chronicles and biographical dictionaries, we will portray how a rather brief contact between ʿAbbāsid Iraq and India proved to yield enduring influences. We will focus on two aspects of Muslim medical practice for demonstrating the Indian connection: the presence of Indian physicians in Baghdād in and around the ʿAbbāsid court, and the emergence of early Muslim hospitals.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1095 | 292 | 4 |
| Full Text Views | 136 | 6 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 173 | 15 | 0 |
