Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 207

āri º b. Kalada were elaborated over
time and include conflicting elements
making it difficult to assess the historical
figure. For similar reasons, it is difficult
to determine the authenticity of reports
regarding Ibn Abī Rim º a, who was sup-
posed to have been a contemporary of the
Prophet and to have practised surgery. It
is evident that a need was felt to justify
and defend the use of medicine by appeal-
ing to accounts which showed the Prophet
and early members of the Muslim com-
munity having recourse to doctors.
Only a few meagre details emerge
regarding the physicians serving the early
Umayyad caliphs. The first Umayyad
caliph, Muāwiya, is said to have employed
a Christian physician of Damascus, Ibn
U º āl. The physician to the caliph Umar
b. Abd al-Azīz (99-101/717-20) is said
to have been Abd al-Malik b. Ab ¡ ar
al-Kinānī, a convert to Islam who report-
edly studied at the surviving medical school
in Alexandria. One of the few Umayyad
physicians known by extant writings, and
possibly the first to translate a medical
treatise into Arabic, is Māsar ¡ awayh,
sometimes called Māsar ¡ īs, a Judaeo-
Persian physician living in Bara. While
some accounts have Māsar ¡ awayh living
at the end of the 2nd/8th or the begin-
ning of the 3rd/9th century, others state
that, for either the caliph Marwān I or
Umar b. Abd al-Azīz, he translated into
Arabic from Syriac the medical handbook
( kunnā ª ) of Ahrun, a 7th-century physi-
cian of the Alexandrian medical school.
Modern historians have usually as-
signed a prominent role in the develop-
ment of Islamic medicine to the city of
Gondē ª āpūr, in southwestern Persia,
which in the 6th century was an outpost
of Hellenism. It has been asserted that
Gondē ª āpūr had an important hospital
and medical school which supported the
translation of Greek and possibly Sanskrit

international in scope and the common
property of all mankind.

(D. Gutas)

Medicine (Ar. ibb)

1. Medicine in the Islamic
world
Medical care in the Islamic world was
pluralistic, with various practices serving
different needs and sometimes intermin-
gling. This medical pluralism allowed
pre-Islamic traditional and magical prac-
tices to flourish alongside medical theo-
ries inherited from the Hellenistic world
and drug lore acquired from India and
elsewhere. The medical practices of pre-
Islamic Arabia appear to have continued
as the dominant form of care into the
early days of the Umayyad caliphate. The
nature of this medical care is known pri-
marily through various adī º s , which later
formed the basis of a genre of medical
writing called al-ibb al-nabawī (see below).
Sources tell us virtually nothing about
the medical care extended to the four
Orthodox Caliphs and little about the
medical care outside the court. There is a
story of an Arab named āri º b. Kalada
who is said to have held learned discus-
sions with the Sāsānid ruler ‡ usraw
Anū ª irwān, to have studied medicine at
Gondē ª āpūr (see below), to have been
sufficiently known for his care that the
Prophet referred sick people to him, and
who, according to some traditions, was
connected with the final illnesses of Abū
Bakr and Umar. The therapy that he
advocated, according to later biographical
literature, reflects traditional practices of
using locally available plants rather than
the Hellenistic tradition generally associ-
ated with Gondē ª āpūr. The accounts of