Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/250

 consequently the Arabs continued to take an active part in the advance of medical knowledge during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Bagdad, however, ceased to be the centre of all this intellectual activity, and eventually Cordova in Spain almost rivaled the capital of ancient Greece in the eagerness with which she sought to increase her stores of books, and in her readiness to honor scholars. By this time the Arabs controlled, not only Persia and Arabia, but also Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Marseilles, the coast of Asia Minor, Greece, Sicily, the northern part of Africa and Spain. Owing to the limited space at my command I shall be obliged to confine my account to the more salient features of the progress made during this later or third stage of the Arab Renaissance.

Already as early as toward the end of the ninth century the number of physicians in the East had increased so greatly, and the territory where well-educated medical men were to be found had broadened to such an extent, that I shall now be obliged, in order to maintain some approach to chronological order in my account of the evolution of medical science, to treat the subject according to countries. If the men who stand out foremost in this third stage of the scientific renaissance are not in every instance Arabs or Persians or Syrians, I may at least claim that they are the product, directly or indirectly, of the great Arab movement. The countries in which their best work was done are the following: Persia (apart from Bagdad and its immediate neighborhood), Egypt, Magreb (the modern Algiers and Tunis), Fez and Spain. But, before I consider the progress of medicine in these different parts of the Orient, I should say at least a few words about the events which characterized the cessation of literary work at Bagdad. As might be expected, that city, after the Greek medical and scientific treatises had all been translated into Arabic, gradually lost its pre-eminence as a centre of learning, and new centres developed in other cities throughout the vast Musulman Empire. It must not be inferred, however, that this change was wholly or even largely due to the cessation of literary work. Other factors contributed