MEDICINE By: Samar 3E

HOSPITALS The Islamic Authorities placed a lot of value in medicine. Baghdad had a hospital by AD 850 and doctors had to pass medical examinations by AD 931 in order to practice. Hospitals were later developed throughout the Islamic world, with the most famous being those in Damascus and Cairo.

ARAB MEDICINE Medical schools and hospitals were built to support the work of Arabic doctors like Rhazes (900 A.D.)

IBN SINA Because Arab pharmacopoeia came from so many sources—as far afield as China, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, southern India and West Africa—it was enorous. In his second volume of the Canon of Medicine, Ibn Sina (a.d. 980–1037, also known as Avicemnna) describes 235 remedies, of which 97 still appear in the official British Pharmacopoeia, as well as 760 medicinal plants and their uses. Ibn Sina also laid out the rules that are the basis of clinical trials today.

IBN NAFIS Another famous doctor from the Islamic Empire was called Ibn Nafis. He lived in Damascus, Syria, in the 1200's AD. Among other things, Ibn Nafis was the first scientist to describe how blood goes from your heart to your lungs to get air and then distributes the air all over your body. (The Roman doctor Galen had suggested some ideas, but Ibn Nafis showed that Galen's ideas were wrong).

PROPETIC MEDICINE A treatise on Prophetic Medicine by al- Dhahabi, who died in 1348 (748 H). A Syro- Egyptian copy completed on 19 August 1464 (14 Dhu al-Hijjah 868 H).

MEDICAL WRITING A genre of medical writing intended as an alternative to the exclusively Greek-based medical systems derivative from Galen was that called al-tibb al-nabawi, Prophetic Medicine. The authors were clerics, rather than physicians, advocating the traditional medical practices of the Prophet Muhammad's day and those mentioned in the Qur'an over the medical ideas assimilated from Hellenistic society, thereby producing a guide to medical therapy acceptable to the religiously orthodox. Therapy consisted