Islamic Medicine

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. The emergence of Islamic medicine came about through the interactions of the indigenous Arab tradition with foreign influences. Translation of earlier texts was a fundamental building block in the formation of Islamic medicine and the tradition that has been passed down.

Latin translations of Arabic medical works had a significant influence on the development of medicine in the high Middle Ages and early Renaissance, as did Arabic texts which translated the medical works of earlier cultures.

In the early Islamic and Mack's period (661–750 AD), Muslims believed that Allah provided a treatment for every illness. Around the ninth century, the Islamic medical community began to develop and utilize a system of medicine based on scientific analysis. The importance of the health sciences to society was emphasized, and the early Muslim medical community strived to find ways to care for the health of the human body. Medieval Islam developed hospitals, expanded the practice of surgery, and eventually integrated women. Important medical thinkers and physicians of Islam were Al-Razi and Ibn Sina. Their knowledge on medicine was recorded in books that were influential in medical schools throughout Muslim history, and Ibn Sina in particular (under his Latinized name Avicenna) was also influential on the physicians of later medieval Europe. Throughout the medieval Islamic world, medicine was included under the umbrella of natural philosophy, due to the continued influence of the Hippocratic Corpus and the ideas of Aristotle and Galen. The Hippocratic Corpus was a collection of medical treatises attributed to the famous Greek physician Hippocrates of Cos (although it was actually composed by different generations of authors). The Corpus included a number of treatises which greatly influenced medieval Islamic medical literature.