Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 208

remained in Ba ∞ dād. The court physi-
cian to the Abbāsid caliph al-Mutawak-
kil, the Christian physician Sābūr b. Sahl,
was also said to have practised medicine in
Gondē ª āpūr before coming to Ba ∞ dād.
Early in the Abbāsid caliphate, interest
was directed toward medical and scien-
tific works from older cultures, especially
Greek—no doubt encouraged by the
Christian court physicians who spoke or
read Syriac and Greek. After translation
was undertaken on a major scale, the Hel-
lenistic and Byzantine medical theories
and practices were completely accepted
and integrated into the learned medical
thinking of the day. The most influential
of the Greek writings to be translated into
Arabic were the compendium on materia
medica by Dioscorides, various treatises by
Rufus of Ephesus, the surgical chapter
from the Greek encyclopaedia by Paul
of Aegina working in Alexandria in the
7th century, and especially the volumi-
nous medical writings and exposition of
humoral medicine by Galen. The Hip-
pocratic writings, while extensively used
by some Islamic physicians, were not in
general as direct a formative influence as
the Galenic writings.
Early in the 3rd/9th century a foun-
dation called bayt al-ikma , the House of
Wisdom, was established in Ba ∞ dād for
promoting the translation of foreign texts.
The most productive translator (though
his relationship with the enterprise called
bayt al-ikma is unclear) was unayn b.
Isāal-Ibādī, another Nestorian Chris-
tian but originally from al-īra in south-
ern Irā. He translated into both Syriac
and Arabic, often working in collabora-
tion with others, including his son Isāb.
unayn and his nephew ubay ª , the
latter sometimes translating into Arabic
the Syriac version made by unayn. Ten
years before his death unayn recorded
that of Galen's works alone, he had made

texts into Middle Persian and Syriac, but
this interpretation has been challenged
by recent historians. There seems to be
no evidence that there was a hospital in
Gondē ª āpūr or a formal medical school.
There may have been a modest infir-
mary where Greco-Roman medicine was
practiced and a forum where medical texts
could be read, as was the case in other
towns such as Susa nearby to the west.
The alleged prominence of Gondē ª āpūr
as a medical centre with hospital was pos-
sibly due to the dominance of Nestorian
Christians amongst the early physicians at
the Abbāsid court who wished to claim
the hospital as their idea and to establish
a history to support their medical author-
ity. Certainly, the Nestorian monopolisa-
tion of early medicine in Ba ∞ dād meant
that the medicine they advocated, based
upon Greek texts, was promoted over the
rival practices of Zoroastrians and Indians
or the native medicine of Arabia.
The influence of Gondē ª āpūr upon
early Abbāsid medicine (if our sources
are reliable) is evident in the promi-
nent role given the Bu ¶ tī ª ū family
of Nestorian Christian physicians. For
eight generations, from the mid-2nd/8th
well into the second half of the 5th/11th
century, twelve members of the family
served caliphs as physicians and advis-
ers, often sponsoring the translation of
texts and composing original treatises.
In 148/765 the caliph Manūr, suffering
from a stomach complaint, called ⁄ ur ¡ īs
b. ⁄ ibrāīl b. Bu ¶ tī ª ū to Ba ∞ dād
from Gondē ª āpūr, where he had been
the leading physician and author of a
Syriac medical handbook. He eventually
returned to Gondē ª āpūr, where he died
after 151/768, but his son was called to
Ba ∞ dād in 171/787, where he remained
until his death in 185/801, serving as
physician to the caliph Hārūn al-Ra ª īd.
The subsequent generations of Bu ¶ tī ª ū