Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 210

Fanā ‡ usraw, and it is one of the most
comprehensive and well-organised medi-
cal compendia of early medical literature.
Its division into two discrete parts, theo-
retical and practical, established a format
common to later mediaeval medical writ-
ings. The fourth medical encyclopaedia of
fundamental importance was K. al-ānūn
fi 'l-ibb by Ibn Sīnā. Composed over a
lengthy period of time as he moved west-
ward from Gurgān to Rayy and then to
Hamadān, the compendium consisted of
five topics: (1) general medical principles;
(2) materia medica ; (3) diseases occurring in
a particular part of the body; (4) diseases
such as fevers that are not specific to one
bodily part; and (5) recipes for compound
drugs. The first topic sometimes circulated
by itself under the title al-Kulliyyāt . Unlike
al-Rāzī or al-Ma ¡ ūsī, Ibn Sīnā did not
name the sources from which he drew his
material. These four attempts at collecting
and systematising the rather unorganised
Hellenistic and Byzantine medical litera-
ture were enormously successful in pro-
ducing a coherent and orderly medical
system. Their sheer size tended to empha-
sise their authoritative nature, reinforced
by titles such as al-ānūn .
The ānūn was, however, not greeted
everywhere with praise. In Spain, when
Abu 'l-Alā Ibn Zuhr, who died in
525/1130, was presented with a copy of
the ānūn , he so disliked it that he refused
to put it in his library, preferring to cut
off its margins for use in writing prescrip-
tions for patients. He also wrote a trea-
tise criticising the materia medica in the
ānūn . His students, like those of al-Rāzī
before him, compiled his therapeutic pro-
cedures and case histories into a book,
K. al-Mu ¡ arrabāt , following his death in
Seville. His son, Abū Marwān b. Zuhr,
wrote several important works, includ-
ing K. al-Itiād intended for a general
audience and K. al-Taysīr concerned with

humoral medicine. Islamic plague tracts
also had as their primary focus the col-
lecting and interpreting of various adī º s
considered relevant to the concepts of
contagion and transmissibility of disease
and the proper reaction to such occur-
rences. Plague tracts also attempted medi-
cal explanations and remedies for plague,
and sometimes a history of plagues up to
the time of composition.
Following the rather rapid appropria-
tion of Greek medicine (with a few Persian
and Indian elements) that occurred in the
3rd/9th century, the organisation of the
vast body of knowledge into a logical and
accessible format became a primary con-
cern. In the 4th/10th and early 5th/11th
centuries, four comprehensive Arabic
medical encyclopaedias were composed
that proved to be particularly influential.
Yet no modern critical editions or trans-
lations of these encyclopaedias are avail-
able. Two of these fundamental works
were written by Abū Bakr Muammad
b. Zakariyyā al-Rāzī: K. al-Manūrī fi
'l-ibb and K. al-āwī. The former, dedi-
cated in 290/903 to the Sāmānid prince
Abū ālial-Manūr b. Isā, governor
of Rayy, is a relatively short general
textbook, while the latter was assembled
posthumously from his working files of
readings and personal observations. The
āwī is a unique type of work in the his-
tory of medicine, and, even though it
was so enormous that few could afford
copies and was not tightly structured as
mediaeval encyclopaedias usually were, it
was frequently used by later physicians. It
was not without its critics, however, for
the K. Kāmil al-ināa al-ibbiyya by Alī b.
al-Abbās al-Ma ¡ ūsī was written in part
as an attempt to redress the lack of proper
organisation and insufficient attention to
anatomy and surgery that is evident in
the āwī. Al-Ma ¡ ūsī dedicated his only
treatise to the Būyid ruler Aud al-Dawla