The early Hebrew and Islamic knowledge of medicine

Most of our knowledge of ancient Hebrew medicine during the 1st millenium BC, encompassing the Iron Age and sees the rise of many successive empires, and spanned from 1000 BC to 1 BC, come from the Torah, the Jewish name for the first five books of the Jewish Bible, i.e. the Five Books of Moses--Moses, as according to the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an, is a religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed. It contains various health related laws and rituals.

The Hebrew contribution to the development of modern medicine started in  the Byzantine Era (“Byzantium”), the Roman Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople, with the physician Asaph the Jew, also known as “Asaph ben Berakhiah,” “Asaph Judaeus,” “Asaph ha-Jehoudi,” or “Assph ha-Jehoudi” and by other names, the first Hebrew medical writer, and has since been tremendous.

After 750 CE, the Muslim world had the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Sushruta translated into Arabic, and Islamic physicians engaged in some significant medical research, i.e. in the history of medicine, Islamic medicine, Arabic medicine, Greco-Arabic and Greco-Islamic refer to medicine developed in the Islamic Golden Age, and written in Arabic, the “lingua franca” of Islamic civilization.

Notable Islamic medical pioneers include Avicenna, a Persian polymath (“Renaissance man”), or a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas; he wrote almost 450 treatises in a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 survived. He, along with Imhotep and Hippocrates, has also been called the “father of medicine.” In 1025, he wrote “The Canon of Medicine,” an encyclopedia of medicine in five books, considered one of the most famous books in the history of medicine.

Others include: Abulcasis, an Arab physician who lived in Al-Andalus; Avenzoar, an Arab-Muslim physician, surgeon and a contemporary of Maimonides and Averroes; Averroes is an Andalusian Muslim polymath--master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arab music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics; and Ibn al-Nafis, an Arab physician who is mostly famous for being the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood.

Rhazes (“Rasis”), a Persian polymath, a prominent figure in Islamic Golden Age, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher, and scholar, was one of the first to question the Greek theory of humorism (“humoralism”), a now discredited (but historically important) theory of the makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers, positing that an excess or deficiency of any for distance bodily fluids in a person directly influences their temperament and health. Nevertheless, it remained influential in both medieval Western and medieval Islamic medicine.

The Islamic Bimaristan hospitals, an early example of public hospitals, or hospitals owned by a government and receives government funding.

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