Medieval Islamic Medicine

To ignore Islamic medicine from 650 to 1500 AD is tantamount to ignore the advance of medicine in general. Although practice was not necessarily perfect, Islamic physicians were far ahead of their counterparts in the West in the development of theories and techniques. As a result Islamic physicians were called upon to treat the great and noble and thereby entered Western culture and exchanged medical, scientific and cultural information with Westerners. Pormann (classics and ancient history, U. of Warwick) and Savage-Smith (history of Islamic science, U. of Oxford) make accessible to the general reader the history of how Islamic medicine developed, what its practitioners understood in theory, how physicians functioned in society, how they practiced (according to preserved case histories) and how magic and religion figured in treatment. Their concluding chapter on how medieval Islamic medicine still influences modern practice is particularly interesting. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peter E. Pormann is a Wellcome Trust Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina's 'Pragmateia' and Al-Kindi's Philosophical Works.

Emilie Savage-Smith is professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute and a senior research fellow of St. Cross College, both at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Magic and Divination in Early Islam and Science, Tools, and Magic.