Before Western and Modern Medicine & Surgery I

Western medicine, when it started to evolve during the Renaissance, didn't evolve from thin air, but built on traditions from Egypt, Babylonia, India, Old Greece, and, above all, Middle Ages Islam.

This is an article in 2 parts, where we will briefly look at these traditions and some of the greatest representatives of them. Part I (below) is an introduction and general discussion, part II, "Before Western and Modern Medicine & Surgery II: The Great Physicians"presents some of history's most important physicians and what they did.

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease."

(Voltaire)

"Medicine is a science from which one learns the states of the human body with respect to what is healthy and what is not, in order to preserve good health when it exists and restore it when it is lacking."

(Ibn Sina, Qanun fi al-tibb)

General Discussion

At least from a western perspective, the medical science of Europe and the United States is terribly over-estimated. It has not only gone totally astray on several important points - it is locked in its own narrow-minded dogma and has lost its potential for real progress. Today it is more a tool for death than for life. Few treatments are curing, and many are outright devastating to the long-term health. Cancer and cardiovascular disease are the two most obvious examples of ailments where short-term methods cause long-term catastrophes.

In modern health care the human, the individual, has been lost amongst streamline routines and assembly-line treatments. Efficiency is not measured in successful recoveries, but in the number of passing patients. The casualties of healthcare are far more than in any war, perhaps than in all wars combined; and no one seems to care! Add to that the attitude of the medical profession: In 90% of cases the doctor has no idea what is wrong, but does he say so? No, he says something, prescribes a standard treatment (the patient must believe the doctor knows what he is doing) and hopes Mother Nature will take care of the patient. Incidentally, medicine poisoning might very well be the world's most common cause of death - although no one will admit it. But what is the most successful treatment then? To work with nature, not against it.

The great physicians of the past, on whose shoulders the medical science is built, are often forgotten, at least in the West. They represented a time with another paradigm, a time when science had not yet entered a tunnel leading to its own implosion. There are, of course, the partly separate traditions of China and India, but for western medicine their direct influence is still very limited. There is another culture, however, without whose intellectual elite, scientists, alchemists, artists, and physicians, western culture would hardly have evolved - and certainly no medical science worth the name: Islam. For that reason, I am going to cover some of the greatest Arabian and Persian physicians of history; individuals every educated person should know something about.

Why are they important to western medicine? Because the Europeans were little more than intellectual barbarians before the Renaissance, which itself was a direct result of Arabian influence. There were three, perhaps four paths this influence followed. One was by returning crusaders, who assimilated a good deal of Arabian culture and brought it back home. Another was through Sicily, where Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II held a court almost entirely based on Arabian culture, a court he had taken over from Sicily's previous Islamic rulers. A third was the collapse of the Byzantine Empire; when it was lost to the Turks in 1453, a stream of refugees flowed into Europe. The fourth and most important was Moorish Spain, and especially its collapse, which brought a large number of refugees into northern Italy's cities. There they triggered the Renaissance, which is nothing but Arabian-Moorish culture applied to European minds. This brought about alchemy, chemistry, science, mathematics, geography, music, art, literature, games, qualified crafts, foodstuffs, and much more.

So what did these Muslims build further on, what was before them? They had the Greek tradition, and certainly specific influences of Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian origin, as well as from India and China. It is often emphasised that they had preserved the Greek tradition. This, however, is misleading in my opinion, because, I claim, there was no genuine Greek tradition. The more I have been studying ancient cultures, the more I have realised that the Greeks were intellectually very simple people, with hardly any creative power of their own. They were great copiers, however, and what they did was to collect scraps from the great ancient cultures that preceded them and faded in that time of history, and transfer that to posterity: the Egyptian, the Babylonian (building on Sumer), and the Persian, also with some influence from India. Most of what they found, however, they never understood, so they discarded it as useless; what they brought further were just a few scattered pieces of knowledge from the ancient world. In medicine this is very obvious. The medical science of ancient Egypt or Sumer, for instance, was far more advanced than anything the Greeks were ever close to. In some instances more advanced than we are yet close to. This is apparent today, and much of these old civilisations remains yet to be discovered.

But we leave that discussion for another time. Let us concentrate on today's main topic: an overview of the most important Arabian, Moorish and Persian physicians, whose importance for the building of later western medicine was significant. It should be noted, however, that the Greek sources they built heavily on were Hippocrates and Galen - to some extent also Dioscorides and Rufus of Ephesus. Due to their importance to Islamic medicine, I include the two former here (part II). I also include two physicians from ancient Egypt, the two I think an educated layman should know about.

While much material from old Egypt and Sumer is lost, or remains to be found or interpreted, India today has the longest unbroken medical tradition on earth. Older Indian medicine undoubtedly was amongst the sources from which the Muslim physicians learned, especially two works: Sushruta Samhita, and Charaka Samhita.

Sushruta, 6th century BC, is the father of Ayurvedic surgery, and he describes several types of operations, even brain surgery. He made the first known prostatectomy, reconstructed damaged noses with methods of which some are still used, and performed advanced dental and cataract surgery. He, just as many Muslim physicians, was disproportionally interested in eyes. [Blindness and eye disease were very common, and are still common in the Middle East.] Sushruta, however, as most writers of old times, did sum up the knowledge from past and added some of his own to it. Most of these methods are much older, perhaps going back to about 3500 BC.

Charaka, is an old sage whose person is not known to us. Perhaps he is a myth and his work a compilation made by several authors through the ages. His "Samhita", however, is the most authoritative preserved writing on Ayurvedic medicine, and it is older than Sushruta's.

Both Sushruta Samhita, and Charaka Samhita were translated into Arabic by Hunayn Ibn Ishaq [see part II], and influenced subsequent Muslim medicine and surgery.

This list is in almost chronological order, as far as it is possible, so we get the two old Egyptians first, followed by the two Greeks. After that we have physicians from the Muslim world, although not all of them were Muslims. I included only those preceding the European Renaissance, the Middle Ages when Islamic Baghdad, Cairo, and Moorish Spain were the peak of human culture west of China. The selection is subjective. The number of known physicians and writers of medicine from this era is large, but I had to exclude many of high quality on grounds of available space, and to keep the text readable also for general readers.

Apart from what I have compiled here, there is a tradition of Prophetic medicine, which is based on the time of the Prophet Mohammed. No practitioner of this medicine is known by name, although some scholars, more religious than medical, wrote about it. However interesting they might be, I am not including them here, because I think their influence on subsequent medicine has been insignificant.

....continues in part II, "Before Western and Modern Medicine & Surgery II: The Great Physicians".

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(Thumbnail\; from Dioscorides, De materia medica. Public Domain.)

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