Medical progress

• The Islamic religion encouraged medical learning and discoveries, as the Prophet Muhammad said 'for every disease, Allah has given a cure'
• Muslim scientists were encouraged to discover cures and new drugs, such as senna and naphtha
• In the Islamic Empire, people with mental illnesses were treated with compassion
• Islamic medicine valued Hippocratic and Galenic medicine, and it preserved and learned from the books of the ancient world
• Muslim hospitals called bimaristans were meant for treating patients, not simply caring for them as was the case in the Christian world
• Constantine the African


  A merchant who brought Islamic medical discoveries and ancient Greek medical knowledge to Italy around 1065 through Latin translations
• The universities in Padua and Bologna in Italy soon became the best places to study medicine in Medieval Europe
• These medical ideas reached England through trade, as merchants brought new equipment, drugs and books
• Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari


  Identified measles as distinct from smallpox, wrote over 50 books, was critical of one of Galen's books
• Avicenna


  Wrote a great encyclopaedia of ancient Greek and Islamic medicine known as Canon of Medicine, listed the medical properties of 760 different drugs, discussed anorexia and obesity
• Avicenna's Canon of Medicine became the standard European medical textbook used to teach doctors in the West until the seventeenth century
• Ibn al-Nafis


  In the thirteenth century, concluded that Galen was wrong about how the heart worked, claiming that blood circulated via the lungs, but Islam did not allow human dissection and his books were not read in the West
• Europeans continued to accept Galen's mistake until the seventeenth century
• Medieval surgery was a risky business for the patient because surgeons could not help patients with deep wounds to the body, and they sometimes thought pus was a good sign
• Medieval surgical procedures


  • Bloodletting to balance the humours
  • Amputation - cutting off a painful or damaged part of the body
  • Trepanning - drilling a hole into the skull to let the 'demon out'
  • Cauterisation - burning a wound to stop the flow of blood
• A surgeon's tools would include saws for amputation, arrow pullers, cautery irons and bloodletting knives, and patients often had to be held or tied down during operations
• Natural anaesthetics like the mandrake root, opium and hemlock were used, but too much might kill the patient
• Abulcasis


  Muslim surgeon who wrote a 30 volume medical book, invented 25 new surgical instruments and many new procedures & ligatures, made cauterisation popular
• Hugh of Lucca and his son Theodoric


  In 1262, criticised the common view that pus was needed for a wound to heal, used wine on wounds to reduce the chances of infection, had new methods of removing arrows
• Mondino de Luzzi


  Led the new interest in anatomy in the fourteenth century, wrote the book Anathomia which became the standard dissection manual for over 200 years, supervised a public dissection in Bologna in 1315 but the body did not fit Galen's description so was thought to be wrong
• Guy De Chauliac


  Famous French surgeon who wrote influential surgical textbook Chirurgia Magna [1363], had many references to Greek and Islamic writers like Avicenna, quoted Galen about 890 times, supported Theodoric of Lucca's ideas about preventing infection
• John of Arderne


  The most famous surgeon in Medieval England who set up a Guild of Surgeons in London in 1368, his surgical manual Practice [1396] was based on Greek and Arab knowledge and his experience in the Hundred Years War, specialised in operations for anal abscess