Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 244

“he never departed from the method to
which he was accustomed; he did not pre-
scribe a remedy as long as he could pre-
scribe a diet, and he did not prescribe a
compound remedy as long as he could
content himself with a simple drug”
(al-Umarī). Notwithstanding these mod-
ern ideas on treatment, and although Ibn
al-Nafīs was exalted by his admirers as a
second Avicenna, he seems to have been
a learned theorist rather than a practical
physician, but the range and depth of his
general culture are impressive.
The literary activity of Ibn al-Nafīs was
important and extensive. He was mainly
a commentator but one of independent
mind and very extensive knowledge. He
is said to have written most of his works
out of his head without reference to
topics, which seems to be confirmed by
the fact that as a rule they contain, as far
as they are not commentaries, very few
references to earlier works. His main writ-
ings are: (1) the Kitāb al- · āmil fi 'l-ibb , an
encyclopaedia of medicine which was to
have consisted of three hundred volumes
(this word to be taken in the conventional
meaning of some ninety folios), of which
only eighty volumes were completed;
several volumes exist, partly in the auto-
graph of the author, 203-10); (2) the Kitāb
al-Muha ££ ab fi 'l-kul , a comprehensive
but not very original record of the whole
knowledge of the Arabs in ophthalmology;
it was used by several later authors; (3) the
Mū ¡ iz ānūn , an extract from all parts of
the anūn of Ibn Sīnā, but omitting anat-
omy and physiology; it is a concise man-
ual of the whole of medicine, particularly
useful for the practitioner, and among the
works of Ibn al-Nafīs it has met with the
greatest success in the Oriental medical
world; it exists in numerous manuscripts,
was printed or lithographed a number of
times, was the subject of a series of com-
mentaries and glosses, the most reputed

of which, by Nafīs b. Iwa al-Kirmānī
(completed 841/1437), was lithographed
in India for the last time as recently as
1328/1910; it was also translated into
Turkish and into Hebrew. (4) Among
the medical commentaries written by Ibn
al-Nafīs the most widely disseminated one
is on the Aphorisms ( Fuūl ) of Hippocrates;
he also wrote commentaries on Hippo-
crates's Prognostics, Epidemics, and De
natura hominis ; (5) he further commented
upon the Masāil fi 'l-ibb of unayn b.
Isā, (6) and he wrote an extensive com-
mentary on the ānūn of Ibn Sīnā which
exists in numerous manuscripts, improv-
ing the arrangement of the subject-matter
and, in particular, collecting the passages
relating to anatomy from the first three
sections of the ānūn and commenting
on them in a separate section, which was
often copied as an independent book; in
this section, Ibn al-Nafīs sets out his the-
ory of the lesser circulation of the blood
(see below); his commentary on the fifth
section of the ānūn was translated into
Latin by the Renaissance physician and
scholar Andrea Alpago and posthumously
printed in Venice 1547. (7) Of the writings
of Ibn al-Nafīs on logic, there exists his
commentary on his own Kitāb al-Wurayāt ,
a summary of the contents of Aristotle's
Organon and Rhetoric ; the section summa-
rizing the Analytica Priora includes a discus-
sion of the legal proofs in Islamic law and
of the limited value of iyās from the point
of view of logic. His writings on grammar
and rhetoric, and his commentary on the
Tanbīh of · īrāzī (if the mention of this
last work by al-Subkī is not merely the
result of an error) do not seem to have
survived, but the Mu ¶ taar fī ilm uūl
al-adī º , on the science of tradition, has
been preserved. (8) There is, finally, Risāla
al-Kāmiliyya fi 'l-sīra al-nabawiyya , which
can be freely translated as The Theologus
Autodidactus .