Alexandrian Tradition into Arabic: Medicine

Abstract

Alexandria was the centre of Hellenistic scholarship. It is here that the works of the classical physicians Hippocrates and Galen (d. CE 216) were collected and commented upon, that the canon of (mostly) 16 books by Galen, meant for medical instruction, was established and abridged to the Summaria Alexandrinorum, that the scholarly genres of (medical) encyclopedia and commentary were cultivated, and that “Galenism,” primarily Galen’s system of humoral pathology and his teleological interpretation of anatomy began to flourish.

All these texts and many more by authors other than Hippocrates and Galen, all the genres of medical writing and ways of medical instruction, not least a close relation between Galenism and Alexandrian Aristotelianism found their way into, and were to dominate, Arabic medicine. The principal vehicle for this complex transmission was the translation campaign, Greek into Arabic, of scholars, active under early ʿAbbāsid rule (ninth century CE) in Baghdad, and led by the Nestorian master translator, Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq. This campaign not only laid the foundation for a consistent medical and pharmaceutical terminology in Arabic but also paved the way for a more flexible postclassical Arabic. The creative appropriation of Hellenistic scholarship in general, and medicine in particular, as collected and canonized in Alexandria, constituted a defining political and cultural feature of early ʿAbbāsid society. However, it remains a matter of dispute how direct and continuous that tradition “from Alexandria to Baghdad” was.