Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:37:17.364Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The Legacy of Classical Antiquity in Byzantium and the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2023

Get access

Summary

In the late ninth or early tenth century CE, the Rayy-born Arabic-speaking physician Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakarīyā al-Rāzī (865 – ca. 925 CE), better known in the medieval West as Rhazes and in contemporary scientific literature as Rāzī, wrote a treatise on Smallpox and Measles (Kitāb al-gudarī wa’l-hasbah), which represented the most advanced state of medicine at that time. In fifteen chapters, the work analyzes the causes of smallpox epidemics (chapter 1), the profile of the patients susceptible to succumb to epidemics (2), the circumstances under which epidemics start (3), the types of smallpox (4), the prevention (5) and therapy (6), particularly the treatment of eyes (7), and the general evolution of the disease (8). Then it returns to the therapy, which it treats exhaustively, including diet.

According to a still widely accepted historiography, Byzantium, which claimed to have inherited the legacy of Antiquity, and the West, which was emerging from a deep transformation of populations, society and political entities, had only at their disposal at Rāzī’s time poor medical manuals, deprived of theory.

Such a view might result from an insufficient inventory and analysis of the surviving manuscript evidence, the lack of a critical edition for many texts that are not necessarily of secondary importance, and probably also a classicizing tendency that a priori favours Antiquity and its early Byzantine continuity and simultaneously rejects its subsequent developments, indeed of a different nature.

As a proof of the richness of medical literature during the centuries preceding or immediately following Rāzī’s time one could mention, for the East, the recently edited manual of the less well-known Paul of Nicea, probably to be situated after the seventh century and before the ninth or tenth, and the medical encyclopedia of the tenth-century physician Theophanos Chrysobalantes mostly known under the name he was given in the Renaissance, Theophanes Nonnos. For the West, the so-called Lorscher Arzneibuch (or Medical Formulary of Lorsch) from the end of the eighth century and the St Gall Botanicus (Herbal) of the ninth century could be mentioned among many other examples.

If there is, indeed, an important medico-pharmaceutical literature of the early and, maybe also, of the late Middle Ages that has been ignored until recently and that should be explored more systematically, the question to be addressed is not so much why this body of knowledge has been neglected in contemporary medical historiography.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×