Cordoba’s 70 libraries, 900 public baths, 300 mosques and 50 maristans were available to all of its one million residents,read the article ‘Pioneer Physicians’ by David Tschanz in Saudi Aramco World

Pioneer Physicians

By: David Tschanz

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In 1120, a Muslim doctor was on his way to see his patient, the Almoravid ruler of Seville. By the side of the road he saw an emaciated man holding a water jug. The man’s belly was swollen, and he was in obvious distress.

“Are you sick?” the doctor asked. The man nodded.

“What have you been eating?”

“Only a few crusts of bread and the water from this jug.”

“Bread won’t hurt you,” said the doctor. “It could be the water. Where are you getting it?”

“From the well in town.”

The doctor pondered a moment. “The well is clean. It must be the jug. Break it and find a new one.”

“I can’t,” whined the man, “This is my only jug.”

“And that thing bulging out there,” replied the doctor, pointing to the man’s midsection, “is your only stomach. It is easier to find a new jug than a new stomach.”

The man continued to protest, but one of the doctor’s servants picked up a stone and smashed the jug. A dead frog spilled out with the foul water.

“My friend,” the doctor said to the patient, “look what you have been drinking. That frog would have taken you with him. Here, take this coin and go buy a new jug.”

When the doctor passed by a few days later, he saw the same man sitting by the side of the road. His stomach had shrunk, he had gained weight, and his color was back. Seeing the doctor, the man heaped praise on him.

—attributed to Ibn Abi Usaybi’a, 13th century

“Snip”

national library of medicine

By the time this woodcut showing followers of Albucasis (as Al-Zahrawi was known in Latin) was produced in 1516 in Spain, his medical legacy was already more than 500 years old.

The Abbasids had taken power from the Damascus-based Umayyad dynasty. Abdulrahman, grandson of the 10th Umayyad caliph, escaped the massacre of his relatives and in 758 ce took asylum in Spain. Within a few years, this intrepid ruler had carved out a rival caliphate with its capital at Córdoba, and by the late 10th century Córdoba had surpassed Baghdad as the center of intellectual activity in the Islamic world.

Córdoba’s 70 libraries, 900 public baths, 300 mosques and 50 maristans were available to all of its one million residents. Córdoba’s university, founded in the eighth century, was a premier center of learning, and its library held at least 225,000 volumes. (At that time, the library of the University of Paris held some 400 volumes.) It drew scholars from all over Europe—one of them, Gerbert of Aurillac, later became Pope Sylvester ii, who replaced cumbersome Roman numerals with today’s “Arabic” numbers. Al-Andalus was soon home to accomplished and innovative philosophers, geographers, engineers, architects and physicians.

In the western caliphate, doctors differed from their eastern counterparts. Although Córdoba and Baghdad were in close contact intellectually, the western physicians exhibited more independence of thought than their more classics-bound eastern colleagues, offering no blind obedience to either Galen or the Canon of Ibn Sina, the 10th-century Bukhara-born physician who was the Arab world’s equivalent of Aristotle and Leonardo. Instead, they challenged and rejected both when their own experience justified it. Their writings and research showed their preference for the concise, the brief and the exact, as contrasted with the discursive, often hair-splitting, subtleties preferred by the savants of the East.

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