Medical Knowledge and the Islamic Golden Age

In a recent post, stimulated by the murals at the Papageorgiou General Hospital, I explored what the Ancient Egyptians contributed to medical knowledge. Now I turn to see what the Arab culture had to contribute. Our point of historic reference is the Islamic Golden Age which roughly spanned 7^th-13^th centuries AD.

Islam is said to have emerged from the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, conquering the old Egyptian, Persian, Roman and Near Eastern Empires. Its language being Arabic, it integrated elements of these cultures into its own and became the centre of a brilliant civilization, of great scientific, philosophic and artistic significance. It should be noted that some scholars term this ‘Arab Science’ though not all the scientists were Arabs and not all were Muslims. The main centres of learning were widespread, ranging from Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and later, Cordoba in Spain.

But, of course, our focus is the field of medicine, which was the central part of this culture. Physicians and scholars were greatly influenced by Galen and Hippocrates. Below we see an image and text showing the muscle system as they understood it.

During this time, they established the foundations of clinical practice, including supervised pharmacies, hospital systems and experimental medicine.   

The image above shows an impression of an operation being carried out. Clearly there they are not using the instruments below which were used for trepanning or trepanation – drilling a hole in the human skull!

A great contribution of theirs was to collect, translate into Arabic and collate knowledge from disparate sources. It was from their summaries and encyclopaedias that western doctors learned of Greek medicine, making it more systematic and accessible. For example, Ibn Sina created the Canon of Medicine, a five-book encyclopaedia, which was translated into Latin and disseminated in printed form throughout Europe. Below we see a depiction of him examining a patient.

During this time Europe, in stark contrast, was going through the so-called Dark Ages. It was largely the Arab Golden Age that contributed to development in mediaeval Europe towards a culture of free inquiry and rational scientific thinking.

 We owe much to the contributions to knowledge made at that time.