Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/123

 soul, an abridgment of Porphyry's Isagoge, and an introductory manual of medicine (Masudi. ii. 72). At that time medical studies were still very largely in Christian and Jewish hands, and we find the Syriac physician John ben Serapion (end of 9th cent. A.D.) writing in Syriac medical pandects which were circulated in two editions, the latter of which was translated into Arabic by several writers independently and long afterwards into Latin by Gerard of Cremona.

The father of Arabic medicine proper was Abu Bakr Muhammad b. Zakariyya ar-Razi (d. A.H. 311–320 =A.D. 923–932) who was known to Latin mediaeval writers as "Razes," a student of music, philosophy, literature, and finally medicine. In his medical pandects he uses both Greek and Indian authorities, and the introduction of these latter in subordination to the classic authorities used at Alexandria was the really important contribution made by the Arabic students to the progress of science. Unfortunately ar-Razi's work suffered from the defect that it greatly lacks order and arrangement, it is a collection of more or less separate treatises, and so not at all convenient to use. For this reason more perhaps than any other he was replaced by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) whose work, if anything, errs in the opposite direction and suffers from an extremely elaborate arrangement and systematization. It will be noticed that with the Arabic writers, as with their Syriac predecessors, the leading medical