Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman.

  • Newman, George, Sir, 1870-1948
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Linacre's influence on English medicine / by Sir George Newman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    17/44 (page 15)
    the reign of both, Arabic learning became dominant. It had established itself as the instrument or channel of Byzantine Greek medicine, which it derived from its ability to assimilate the Syrian and Jewish medi¬ cine of the Nestorians.* First Gondisapor and then Bagdad, took the place of Edessa—the original Nestorian medical centre before 489—as the prin¬ cipal medical schools of the East and the influence of the great Arabian physicians, Rhazes of Bagdad, Ali Abbas, and Avicenna of Bokara, spread wher¬ ever Arabian arms had won supremacy.t The Canon of Avicenna became in East and West the text-book of medicine, carrying within its covers an inadequate and miscellaneous account of the learn¬ ing of Hippocrates and Galen. The University of Cordova was founded in the eighth century and be¬ came the Bagdad of the West. Of its leaders Albucasis translated for Europe the works of Galen and Rhazes, and Avenzoar and Averroes those of Aristotle. The schoolmen of the Middle Ages car¬ ried on the tradition. The trouble was that the tradition itself was fallacious. The learning had come through Greek, Syrian, Persian, Arabic, and Latin, and in its translations and retranslations had suffered almost as much as by its Arabic transmu¬ tations. The Arabs and Persians brought something of their own. We must not forget, for instance, that the first- * See Robertson’s History of the Christian Church, 1858; Neale’s History of the Holy Eastern Church, 1847, Vols. i. and ii.; Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Rome, chaps, xlvii. and lxvi.; and Arabian Medicine and its Influence on the Middle Ages. D. Campbell, 1926, vol. i. f Dr. Neligan, of Teheran, has stated that Rhazes and Avicenna were Persians by birth. Various races associated in the vast Islamic movement are included in the generic term “Arab.”