Medieval Islamic Medicine Essay

Medieval Islamic medicine differed from its ancient Greek counterpart in a number of ways, one of which was the rising involvement of rulers, high-ranking officials, groups of scholars and female practitioners in numerous healthcare sectors. However, few people could achieve the status of a truly learned physician, whose specialties and general functions were quite different from those of other medical occupations such as druggists, bone-setters and ophthalmologists. Particularly, Ibn Zuhr (d. 1162), an Arab physician in Muslim Spain, once categorically stated in his treatise that physicians should not be concerned with treating the patients by means of surgery, but rather by means of diet and medications (Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval …show more content…
According to Ibn Zuhr, not only surgical operations but also other manual techniques, such as bloodletting, cautery and phlebotomy, should be assigned to the assistants. A successful performance of cataract couching was therefore the highest recognition conferred to the class of assistants but not to the physician. Similarly, al-Razi (d. 925), a Persian polymath, did not mention surgery as a practice that he undertook himself in his Books of Experiences, and implied that others performed it. Yet in emergency occasions, as in the treatment of abdominal wounds, a rare number of physicians such as al-Zahrawi indeed performed a surgery to prevent protrusion of the intestines, and recorded their works as case histories (Pormann and Savage-Smith, pp. 122-124). Apart from that, most other times they still refused to operate, as when al-Zahrawi observed a hydrocephalic child but stated that he “prefered not to undertake operation” (Pormann and Savage-Smith, p. 62). The often limited, unchanged surgical literature within populous Islamic societies also suggested that physicians hardly-ever engaged in, or at least modified the surgical procedures accumulated in earlier Greek sources, and those texts’ applicability in