The Physician as a Rebellious Intellectual: The Book of the Two Pieces of Advice or Kitāb Al-Naṣīḥatayn by C Abd Al-Laţ

ISBN-13: 9783631642856 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 214 str.

N. Peter Joosse

Opis

The medical section of the Kitab al-Na?i?atayn or Book of the Two Pieces of Advice by the medieval author cAbd al-Latif ibn Yusuf al-Baghdadi (1162-1231) challenges the idea that Arabic-Islamic medicine declined after the twelfth century A.D. Moreover, it offers some interesting insights into the social history of medicine. cAbd al-Latif composed his work as a diatribe directed against false knowledge, and employed the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day and age. He argued that female and itinerant practitioners, relying on experience, were superior to some rationalists, and decried the wickedness and incompetence of certain medical practitioners of his time. In addition, he lambasted contemporaneous medical education because it put too much faith in a restricted number of textbooks such as the Canon of Medicine by the celebrated physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna), or chiefly relied on imperfect abridgments. The medical section of the Book of the Two Pieces of Advice is translated here for the first time in a modern language. It is preceded by a lengthy introduction that highlights cAbd al-Latifs complicated relation to both medicine and alchemy. The present study also contains the first full bibliography on cAbd al-Latif ibn Yusuf al-Baghdadi and his milieu.

Spis treści

Contents: Medieval Islam - Social history - Medical epistemology - Women - Quacks and charlatans - Medical education - cAbd al-Latif ibn Yusuf al-Baghdadi (1162-1231) - Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 1037).

O autorze

N. Peter Joosse was a fellow-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a senior research fellow at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Leiden. In 2010, he joined the Department of Classics & Ancient History of the University of Warwick as a Wellcome Trust research fellow to work on cAbd al-Latif ibn Yusuf al-Baghdadi Arabic commentary on the Hippocratic Prognostic. In 2013 he joined the University of Oxford based project on Ibn abi Usaybica.