Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 225

in the kidney and bladder ( K. al-aā fi 'l-kulā
wa 'l-ma º āna ) and Smallpox and measles
( K. al- ⁄ adarī wa 'l-aba ). The latter was
the first book on smallpox, and was trans-
lated over a dozen times into Latin and
other European languages. Its lack of
dogmatism and its Hippocratic reliance
on clinical observation typify al-Rāzī's
medical methods. His independent mind
is strikingly revealed in his · ukūk alā
⁄ alīnūs or “Doubts about Galen”. Here
al-Rāzī rejects claims of Galen's, from
the alleged superiority of the Greek
language to many of his cosmological
and medical views. He places medicine
within philosophy, inferring that sound
practice demands independent thinking.
His own clinical records, he reports, do
not confirm Galen's descriptions of the
course of a fever. And in some cases he
finds that his clinical experience exceeds
Galen's. He rejects the notion, central
to the theory of humours, that the body
is warmed or cooled only by warmer or
cooler bodies; for a warm drink may heat
the body to a degree much hotter than
its own. Thus the drink must trigger a
response rather than simply communicat-
ing its own warmth or coldness. This line
of criticism has the potential, in time, to
bring down the whole theory of humours
and the scheme of the four elements, on
which it was grounded. Al-Rāzī's alchemy,
like his medical thinking, struggles within
the cocoon of hylomorphism. It dismisses
the idea of potions and dispenses with an
appeal to magic, if magic means reliance
on symbols as causes. But al-Rāzī does
not reject the idea that there are wonders
in the sense of unexplained phenomena
in nature. His alchemical stockroom,
accordingly, is enriched with the prod-
ucts of Persian mining and manufacture,
and the Chinese discovery, sal ammo-
niac. Still reliant on the idea of dominant
forms or essences and thus on the Neo-

platonic conception of causality as inher-
ently intellectual rather than mechanical,
al-Rāzī's alchemy nonetheless brings to
the fore such empiric qualities as salinity
and inflammability—the latter ascribed
to “oiliness” and “sulphuriousness”. Such
properties are not readily explained by
the traditional fire, water, earth and air
schematism, as fi azālī and other later
comers, primed by thoughts like al-Rāzī's,
were quick to note.
Like Galen, al-Rāzī was speculatively
interested in the art and profession of
medicine. He wrote essays on such sub-
jects as “The reasons for people's prefer-
ence of inferior physicians,” “A mistaken
view of the function of the physician,”
“Why some people leave a physician if he
is intelligent,” “That an intelligent physi-
cian cannot heal all diseases, since that is
not possible,” and “Why ignorant physi-
cians, common folk, and women in the
cities are more successful than scientists
in treating certain diseases—and the phy-
sician's excuse for this.” He also shared
Galen's interest in philosophy and heeded
his treatise, “That the outstanding physi-
cian must also be a philosopher.” Al-Bīrūnī
lists some eighty philosophical titles in his
al-Rāzī bibliography, and Nadīm lists doz-
ens of his works on logic, cosmology, the-
ology, mathematics and alchemy. Given
the general repugnance toward al-Rāzī's
philosophical ideas among his contem-
poraries and medieval successors, few of
these works were copied. But fragments
survive in quotations by later authors,
as do the Sīra al-falsafiyya and the ibb
al-rūānī , the “Spiritual physick” or “Psy-
chological medicine,” which embodies
al-Rāzī's largely Epicurean ethical system.
Among the writings of which we have
mention are: a commentary on Plato's
Timaeus , perhaps based on the epitome of
Galen, a rebuttal of Iamblichus' response
to Porphyry's Letter to Anebos (that is, the