Islamic medicine

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This is a sub-article to Islamic science and Medicine.

Islamic medicine is the profession of Muslim doctors and one of the fields of study in Islamic science. The modern advancement of Islamic medicine can be seen as part of the broader movement of the Islamization of knowledge.

1 Early Islamic medicine
- 1.1 Ophthalmology
2 Modern Islamic medicine
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Early Islamic medicine

Islamic medicine

Islamic Medicine was a genre of medical writing intended as an alternative to the Greek-based medical system. Its authors were usually clerics, rather than physicians. They were known to have advocated the traditional medical practices of prophet Muhammad's time, those mentioned in the Qur'an. For instance therapy did not require a patient to undergo any surgical procedures. The "Comprehensive Book of Medicine" was written by the Iranian chemist Rhazes, the "Large Comprehensive", was the most sought after of all his compositions. In it, Rhazes recorded clinical cases of his own experience and provided very useful recordings of various diseases. The "Comprehensive Book of Medicine", with its introduction on measles and smallpox, was also very influential in Europe. The Mutazilite philosopher and doctor Ibn Sina was another influential figure. His "The Canon of Medicine" remained a standard text in Europe up until the renewal of the Muslim tradition of scientific medicine. Ibn Nafis described human blood circulation. This discovery would be rediscovered, or perhaps merely demonstrated, by William Harvey in 1628. He generally receives his credit in Western history. There was a persistent pattern of Europeans repeating Muslim research in medicine and Islamic astronomy. Some say they also repeated research in physics and claimed credit for it also.

[edit] Ophthalmology

Main article: Ophthalmology in medieval Islam

Of all the branches of Islamic medicine, ophthalmology was certainly the foremost. The specialized instruments used in their operations ran into scores. Innovations such as the “injection syringe”, a hollow needle, invented by Ammar ibn Ali of Mosul, which was used for the extraction by suction of soft cataracts were quite common.

[edit] Modern Islamic medicine

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As with everybody else, Muslim physicians surgeons and pharmacologists engage in the study and practice of the many disciplines of medicine throughout the universities and medical centers of the world, and thus contribute to the collective advancement of these sciences, especially by those innovating new techniques and engaging in original research. There are some themes of study that one may find among Muslim medicinal researchers, that are distinguished from their non-Muslim counterparts in that they are motivated by specific precepts, particularly from the Quran, such as with the medicinal properties of bee honey, fire cupping, and other practices that have been given direct mention in Islamic tradition.

In terms of medical ethics, some recent notable positions include the argument by a female Saudi Arabian doctor to use bone marrow as a source of stem cells instead of having to resort to embryonic stem cells for stem-cell research. In another instance, between the late 1990s and early 2000s, a conference of Muslim jurisprudist and Muslim bio-medicinal specialists from Europe and the Muslim world outlined a rationale against cloning humans derived and informed from the principles of Muslim jurisprudence and ethical system. This rationale included the arguments that the clone would not fall in the categories of kinship defined in islam for the sake of familial and inheritance rights as well the boundaries on marriage or mixing with kin versus non-kin. The argument being that the cloned person would not fit the scope of a kin, and would therefore be deprived of family connections that all humans currently enjoy, such as filial or sibling affiliations - in other words a human clone would be condemned to being parentless. Another argument used in arriving at a rejection of human cloning, is that cloning would undermine the diversity necessary for the healthy continuation of the human gene pool. Research on the benefits of bee-honey as a healing agent, are being independently corroborated by similar research around the world. As an example or instance of shiite thought on medicinal issues, see the resource on organ donation according to Sistani and al-Islam.org: [1] .