The Substantive Relationship between Ancient Medical Texts and Medical Narratives; A Case Study of Health Care Narratives

One of the types of hadiths is the medical hadiths that have been included in Shia and Sunni sources. In addition to traditions, some scientific sources of Muslims are books compiled by Muslim scientists on the subject of medicine. Since a large part of medical hadiths do not have strong documents; therefore, various views have been proposed regarding the origin and validity of these hadiths. On the other hand, due to the subject of these narratives, which is among human knowledge, there are three assumptions about the content of ancient medical texts and medical hadiths. In a pessimistic view, the main form of medical hadiths are fake texts that are based on medical sources and entered into the hadith collections by attaching documents to them. The opposite view is the compilation of medical sources based on medical hadiths; that is, in general, the knowledge of medicine was formed based on the medical hadiths of the Prophets and by removing their documents. The third possibility is the separate nature of these two groups of sources, which are formed from two different origins, and if it is proven, the invalidity of the first two hypotheses will be revealed. A comparative study between these two groups of sources is necessary to discover the correctness of the third assumption. The existence of similarities and differences between these two groups of sources, which is the result of a comparative study, shows the correctness of the third assumption.