Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 224

least equally with his original works. The
biographers are unanimous in praising his
skill as a translator of Greek works into
Arabic, and in the light of the surviving
translations their esteem seems to be fully
justified.

Manūr b. Isā, the Sāmānid governor
of Rayy; his Mulūkī or Regius , to Alī b.
Wāhsū £ ān of abaristān. The author of
some two hundred topics, al-Rāzī claims
in his apologia, the Sīra al-falsafiyya , or
“Philosophical Way of Life”, that his has
been a life of moderation, excessive only
in his devotion to learning; he associated
with princes never as a man at arms or
an officer of state but always, and only,
as a physician and a friend. He was con-
stantly writing. In one year, he urges, he
wrote over twenty thousand pages, “in
a hand like an amulet maker's.” Oth-
ers remark on his generosity and com-
passion, seeing that the poor among his
patients were properly fed and given
adequate nursing care. Arriving patients
first saw an outer circle of disciples, and
then an inner circle, if these could not aid
them, leaving al-Rāzī himself to treat the
hardest cases. His medical research was
similarly methodical, as revealed in his
notebooks. These were edited, in some 25
volumes, as the K. al-āwī fi 'l-ibb , at the
instance of Ibn Amīd, the vizier of Rukn
al-Dawla. Translated as the Continens in
1279 by the Jewish physician Fara ¡ b.
Sālim (known as Farraguth) for King
Charles of Anjou, it was printed at
Brescia in 1486 and repeatedly there-
after. The text contains al-Rāzī's exten-
sive notes from a wide range of sources,
organised anatomically, from head to
toe. His own clinical observations, often
at variance with received opinions, typi-
cally close the sections. Al-Rāzī mined
these files for his numerous medical
works, and several unfinished works can
be discerned in the āwī in embryo. His
magnum opus, the Kitāb al- ⁄ āmi al-kabīr ,
or “Great Medical Compendium”, often
confused with the āwī , was a work that
al-Rāzī published, not the corpus of his
private files. Among the most famous of
his medical writings are those on Stones

(D. Hill)

Abū Bakr al-Rāzī

Abū Bakr Muammad b. Zakariyyā
al-Rāzī known to the Latins as Rhazes
(ca.250/854-313/925 or 323/935),
al-Rāzī was a physician, philosopher and
alchemist.
The most free-thinking of the major
philosophers of Islam, al-Rāzī was born
in Rayy, where he was well trained in the
Greek sciences. He was reputedly well
versed in musical theory and performance
before becoming a physician. His work
in alchemy takes a new, more empiri-
cal and naturalistic approach than that
of the Greeks or ⁄ ābir, and he brought
the same empirical spirit to medicine.
Immersed in the Galenic tradition, and
apparently even conversant with Greek
(al-Bīrūnī ascribes to him translations and
abridgements from the Greek and even a
poem “in the Greek language”), al-Rāzī
greatly profited from the Arabic transla-
tions of Greek medical and philosophical
texts. He headed the hospital of Rayy
before assuming the corresponding post
in Ba ∞ dād. His property in the vicinity
seems to have brought him back often
to Rayy, and he died there, somewhat
embittered and alienated, partly by the
loss of his eyesight. Like many of the great
physicians of Islam, al-Rāzī was a courtier
as well as a scholar, clinician and teacher.
His medical handbook the Manūrī , trans-
lated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona
in the 12th century, was dedicated to