The Greek Heritage

My name is Peter Pullman,

and I'm a professor of classics and Greek

Arabic studies at the University of Manchester.

Now, when we talk about medicine in the Arabic speaking world,

we also have to speak about the Greeks because a lot of the medical theory

and practise that happened in the mediaeval

Islamic world is based on Greek sources.

Uh

um, So we have to look at the massive translation movement from Greek into Arabic.

Now, when we look at Greek medicine,

some of you will know the names of Hippocrates and Galen Hippocrates,

the father of medicine who lived in the fifth century BC and Galen of Pergamon,

who lived from 1 29 2 to 16

a. D.

There are other doctors Rufus Paul of Aegina and

so on so forth who are also important.

But we'll focus on 11 figure here and that scale.

And because Galen basically took Hippocrates and elevated

him to this huge and important figure.

And basically both the Hippocrates, as defined by Galen and Galen himself,

became the most important doctors and the Arabic tradition at the beginning.

Um So how did Galen become known in Arabic?

There was what we call a translation movement or an effort

to translate most of the Greek non medical text into Arabic.

And that happened in Baghdad in the ninth century A.

D and here, the central figure as somebody called

find evenness. Harker was a translator. He was a Christian translator.

His mother tongue, so to speak, was Syriac and Aramaic dialect,

the language that Jesus would have spoken.

And he translated a lot of works from Greek

into Syriac and then from Syriac into Arabic.

And he had a whole team of people around him, his son, his heart, given her nine,

his nephew who buys and others.

So in the ninth century in Baghdad,

basically the non Greek texts get translated into Arabic.

And how could this happen? Or what are the methods? How is this translation done?

Well,

we have to understand that Hernan himself was

very much influenced by this Galen of programme.

Um, this Greek doctor once again 1 29 2 to 16. And

Galen was very keen to compile different

manuscripts and look at different readings,

see differences and different versions of text

attributed to Hippocrates and sort this out.

And he did all this In his commentaries,

he wrote numerous commentaries on Hippocrates, which became very important.

Now what does, Uh oh, nine. Then do.

He basically looks at what Galen had done and copies these methods.

We call them physiological methods,

methods to read and interpret and understand a text.

And basically, Galen was keen to make Hippocrates say what he wanted,

and her nine followed Galen in his

interpretation.

And, for instance,

he would hunt for manuscripts Greek manuscripts of his

sources in order to find text new text.

Sometimes it is difficult, so we have the example of the epidemics.

There's a text by Hippocrates are attributed to Hippocrates called the Epidemics,

and Hippocrates

wrote this text and seven books, um, and Gail,

and wrote a commentary on them on books 123 and six.

And the important thing is that,

um,

four book to her nine had the hardest time finding

good Greek manuscript and his search and his search,

and over time he found new manuscript and he was able

to fill gaps in his knowledge and improve the text.

So this translation movement was not only

an exercise and basically translating a text

into a new language from Greek into Arabic.

But it was also an exercise in trying to improve

the understanding of the source text of the Greek text.

Um, in the process, what happened is that

or nine and his team forged a new medical language.

So obviously, in pre Islamic poetry in the old Arabic poetry of the 5th, 6th,

7th centuries, there are some terms that have to do with medicine,

but they are rather crude and generalist.

But throughout this translation movement of the ninth century,

a very sophisticated medical language develops.

And here we can briefly, I mean, I hope you will not get bored by this,

but we can briefly say there are three main techniques that Bannon and

his team used in order to render things from Greek into Arabic.

So sometimes they would just use, uh,

they would take a Greek word and find an equivalent in Arabic.

So let's say spazz most spasm in Greek would become to Shannon, uh, spasm in Arabic.

And that is just straightforward. Translation.

Uh, in other cases, however, they would use what we call a cult or a loan Translation.

What do we mean by that?

Uh, take alopecia, alopecia loss of here,

basically is a condition that is named after a fox,

a Loop X and Greeks means Fox and alopecia is the fox disease.

So then they translate this word fox disease, alopecia and Greek with

there are thermal up the equivalent of disease of the fox in Arabic.

That's a cult, and sometimes they would just transliterated.

So you have a disease called Free Anita's for nineties,

which is some sort of brain fever, and that just becomes far Anita's.

It's basically just spelled in Arabic letters rather than Greek letters. So

as a result of all this,

we have this new medical language that emerges and that becomes, uh, so important.

And so what is what is the overall idea behind all this?

What is the fundamental idea of medicine in Arabic,

then it instead of human pathology?

What I mean by this? There's a text on The nature of Men

by Hippocrates,

on which Galen writes a commentary that gets translated into Arabic,

and the idea is this.

Therefore us blood flam, yellow bile, black bile.

And when the imbalance health results and the imbalance

leads to disease and each of the four U.

S. has two of the four primary or cardinal qualities hot and cold and dry

and wet.

And so they're mixture of these qualities basically determines health.

So that is the fundamental theory at the fundamental idea that comes from the

Greeks and dominates medical discourse in Arabic

and is also to dominate medical discourse in

the Latin, Middle Ages and the Renaissance until the early modern period.