Ibn Sina

Episode 13 – Medieval Muslim Medicine and Hospitals

Islamic Golden Age (2017)

By Eamon Gearon

Film Review

In this lecture, Gearon discusses the two most prominent physicians during the Golden Age of Islam, Abu Bakr al-Razi and Ibn Sina, and the former’s role in significantly expanding the number of hospitals in the Muslim world.

Abu Bakr al-Razi

Born in 854 AD in Ray Persia, al-Razi is viewed as the father of Islamic medicine and influenced medical studies in Europe and the Middle East for hundreds of years. An accomplished oude player as a teenager, in adulthood, he took up alchemy, mathematics and literature. At age 30, he moved to Baghdad to study medicine. He challenged Galen’s theory that an imbalance in the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) caused all illnesses. Al-Razi asserted some illnesses were caused by oiliness, inflammation, saltiness or sulphurousness

He was the first physician to identify a mind-body connection, the importance of exercise and a healthy diet, to distinguish between smallpox and measles and to prescribe opium for melancholia (depression) – a treatment in wide use until the 20th century. He was also the first to maintain that every illness had a cause that could be discovered by research, ie that sickness wasn’t punishment from God.

He published 200 manuscripts, including Diseases of Children, Comprehensive Book of Medicine, a complete catalogue of existing medical scholarship from ancient Greece, India and Persia, and a home manual for treating everyday illness. European medical students were still using his Comprehensive Book of Medicine as a textbook 700 years later.

He also helped expand the number of hospitals in the Muslim world.* All Muslim hospitals were secular (often funded by private donors), employing Muslim, Christian and Jewish doctor and treating all patients who sought help, regardless of citizenship, race, religion or gender. All hospitals also served as medical schools and were required to keep patient records to be licensed. By 1000 AD, there were 30 hospitals across the Islamic world, each housing separate wards for contagious disease, mental illness and surgery.

Ibn Sina

Ibn Sina (980-1037 AD) is viewed a the father of early modern medicine. Born in Uzbekistan, he studied medicine at age 13 and was practicing by 16. He was the first to identify the airborne transmission of illness, to differentiate between central and peripheral facial paralysis, to catalogue various psychiatric illnesses ( asserting they weren’t a punishment from God) and to produce and prescribe heart drugs.

He wrote the five volume Canon of Medicine in 1025, the most comprehensive medical text to that time and still used in Europe in the 18th century.

• Volume 1 – Anatomy and Regima (lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise that improve health)
• Volume 2 – 800 simple medical remedies and their uses
• Volume 3 – list of all body parts and their function
• Volume 4 – lists of ailments of affecting more than one organ
• Volume 5 – formulary of 650 compounded remedies.

*The first hospital in the Middle East was Gondishoper in Persia founded in the third century AD. The 325 AD Council of Nicea subsequently ordained that every cathedral town (in the Byzantine Empire) would build a hospital. The first Muslim hospital (it was actually a leprosarium) was built by the Umayyad calipphate in 707 in Damascus. Harun al-Rashid built the first hospital in Baghdad in 809 AD.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/5756987/5757013