Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 235

of these works or of parts of them have
come down to us, as have also manu-
scripts of the Arābā £ īn of the famous
physician and philosopher Abū Bakr
Muammad b. Zakariyyā al-Rāzī. Of
the pharmacopoeias written in the East,
the Arābā £ īn of Badr al-Dīn Muammad
b. Bahrām al-alānisī, who wrote in the
year 590/1194, is also worth mention-
ing. In this work, of which several manu-
scripts have come down to us, the author
quoted the āwī and the ibb al-Manūrī
of al-Rāzī, the ānūn of Avicenna and
other works. Of the great medical compi-
lation written by Na ¡ m Dīn Mamūd b.
Iyās · īrāzī (d. 730/1330), the 5th part,
containing a treatise on compound drugs,
was edited by F.F. Guigues.
In Egypt the Jewish physician Mūsā
b. al-Āzār (Moses b. Eleazar) wrote an
Arābā £ īn for the Fatimid caliph al-Muizz.
In the hospitals of Egypt, Syria and Irā
the al-Dustūr al-Bīmāristānī of Abu 'l-Fal
b. Abi 'l-Bayān al-Isrāīlī was in common
use until it was replaced by the Minhā ¡
al-Dukkān of Ibn al-Aār al-Isrāīlī which
was published in Kairo in 658/1260.
In Muslim Spain the study of the text
of Dioscurides seems to have inspired an
exclusive confidence in the simple drugs.
We are informed by Ibn Abī Uaybia
that the famous physician Ibn Wāfid (d.
after 460/1068) very seldom prescribed
a compound drug. Like his contempo-
rary Abd Allāh b. Abd al-Azīz al-Bakrī,
who wrote an inventory of the plants and
trees of al-Andalus, Ibn Wāfid seems to
have been an enthusiastic adherent of the
Dioscoridean tradition in medicine. This
is true also of al- fi āfiī, the most impor-
tant pharmacologist of Muslim Spain. In
the Latin tradition the Grabadin of Mesue
Junior (according to Leo Africanus this
work was written by a certain Māsawayh
al-Mārindī, who died in Ba ∞ dād in 1015,
and translated into Latin by a Sicilian Jew)

was for centuries the recognized author-
ity on pharmacy throughout Europe and
became the basis of later official pharma-
copoeias.

(B. Lewin)

Ibn Sīnā

Abū Alī al-usayn b. Abd Allāh b.
Sīnā, known in the West as Avicenna,
followed the encyclopaedic conception
of the sciences that had been traditional
since the time of the Greek Sages in unit-
ing philosophy with the study of nature
and in seeing the perfection of man as
lying in both knowledge and action. He
was also as illustrious a physician as he
was a philosopher.

Life
His life is known to us from authorita-
tive sources. An autobiography covers his
first thirty years, and the rest are docu-
mented by his disciple al- ⁄ uza ¡ ānī, who
was also his secretary and his friend.
He was born in 370/980 in Af ª ana,
his mother's home, near Bu ¶ ārā. His
native language was Persian. His father,
an official of the Sāmānid administra-
tion, had him very carefully educated at
Bu ¶ ārā. His father and his brother were
influenced by Ismāīlī propaganda; he
was certainly acquainted with its tenets,
but refused to adopt them. His intellectual
independence was served by an extraor-
dinary intelligence and memory, which
allowed him to overtake his teachers at
the age of fourteen.
It was he, we are told, who explained
logic to his master al-Nātilī. He had no
teacher in the natural sciences or in medi-
cine; in fact, famous physicians were work-
ing under his direction when he was only
sixteen. He did, however, find difficulty