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Abstract
Various issues involving theoretical and practical dimensions of medicine have been studied by using the Cairo Genizah. However, there are few in-depth studies on medical education. This article focuses on the medieval Arabic ophthalmology textbook, Masāʾil wa-ajwiba fīʿilm ṣināʿat al-kuḥl (hereafter MI), written by Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā. This is a textbook that arranges ʿAlī ibn ʿĪsā’s Tadhkirat al-kaḥḥāllīn (hereafter TK) into the question-and-answer format.
MI is a concise and comprehensive textbook that includes anatomy, physiology, diagnostics, therapeutics, and pharmacology. Whereas Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s Masāʾil fī al-ʿayn is limited to theoretical knowledge, MI contains the total procedure from knowing nature of eye diseases to treatment, and enables readers to apply certain medicinal substances to specific situations. However, MI’s crucial defect is that it arranges treatment plans along one linear disease progression, and cut off many derivative plans.
Schematic composition is the remarkable feature of MI. Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā adopted some medical categories, which had been recognized but left unused in earlier Arabic medical books, in order to present the content in the concise scheme.
The content of MI basically follows that of TK; therefore, it does not contain remarkably new elements. However, since Dāniyāl ibn Shuʿyā arranged TK into the roughly fixed pattern, he occasionally had to fill omissions of TK with his original questions and answers. These new components were presumably referred to by later ophthalmologists such as Khalīfa ibn Abī al-Maḥāsin al-Ḥalabī.
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This article presents a plethora of fragments from the medical notebooks found in the Cairo Genizah that comprise a unique source of historical data for scholarly study and for a better understanding of the ways in which medieval medical knowledge in Egypt was transferred from theory to practice and vice versa. These documents provide the most direct evidence we have for preferred practical medical recipes because they record the choices of medical practitioners in medieval Cairo. Since the language most commonly used in them was Judaeo-Arabic, they were evidently written by Jews. The medical genre in the notebooks was primarily pharmacopoeic, consisting of apparently original recipes for the treatment of various diseases. There are also a few notebooks on materia medica. The subject matter of the Genizah medical notebooks shows that they were mostly of an eclectic nature, i.e. the writers had probably learnt about these treatments and recipes from their teachers, applied them at the hospitals where they worked or copied them from the books they read. Foremost among the subjects dealt with were eye diseases, followed by skin diseases, coughs and colds, dentistry and oral hygiene, and gynaecological conditions. The writers of the Genizah notebooks apparently recorded the practical medical knowledge they wished to preserve for their future use as amateur physicians, students, traditional healers or professional practitioners.
The manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah are a unique source for medieval medical history. In this study, Lev and Chipman offer an insight into the everyday practical medicine of medieval Egypt, as revealed by the prescriptions in the Genizah.
The Mosseri collection was assembled by Jacques Mosseri (1884-1934), a leading member of the Jewish community of Cairo, between 1909 and 1911. Its more than 7000 fragments include materials from both the classical Genizah period and the modern period of Egyptian Jewry. Recently, the Mosseri collection was loaned by the Mosseri family to Cambridge University Library for conservation, digitising, cataloguing and study. This article is part of that effort. Here, new information about medical documents from the Cairo Genizah is made available to scholars especially interested in research on the history of medieval Arab society in general and Jewish medicine and pharmacology in particular. The sixty-nine items from the Mosseri collection here described will be useful for those already working in the field. Descriptions, without any analyses, of these fragments will later be included in a forthcoming catalogue of all medical and para-medical fragments in the Cambridge Genizah collections.
The medical texts in the Genizah have been analyzed mainly as part of other subjects, like the various professional classes within the Jewish community in Old Cairo. Until now few have studied these documents in their own right, despite the fact that they offer valuable insights into the medieval economy of the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Focussing on saffron and myrobalan, this article offers a tentative investigation of the significance of medical drugs for the study of Mediterranean trade in the Middle Ages on the basis of practical medical fragments found mainly at the Taylor-Schechter collection in Cambridge.
Medicine and disease in medieval Islam have thus far been approached through theoretic medical treatises, on the assumption that learned medical texts are a transparent account of reality. A question yet to be sufficiently explored is the extent to which the ideas and theoretical principles they contain were actually carried out in practice. This paper deals with the description of diseases occurring in a tenth-century Casebook (Kitāb al-Tajārib) by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakarīyā' al-Rāzi (known to Europeans as Rhazes)-the largest and oldest collection of case histories, so far as is known, in medieval Islamic medical literature. Since the author was a prolific medical writer, this study also includes a review of his medical and therapeutic principles dealing with eye diseases, as described in his learned treatises, and a comparison with those therapies actually employed in his everyday practice, as exemplified by the Casebook. The comparative analysis shows that the medical knowledge and the therapeutic advice so meticulously described in theoretical works were not paralleled in the physician's medical performance. On the contrary, it appears that learned treatises served other purposes than determining medical practice.
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