Points about History of Islamic Medicine

One can study the Islamic medicine within two stages: establishment; compiling andinnovation. In the establishment stage the Islamic medicine was created on the basis ofGreek rules especially Galenic medicine, but it was not limited to the Greek Galenicmodels. In this stage it freed itself from the fame of Galen through expansion of dialoguesand scientific discussions and adding new elements to the science of medicine; writing onthe subjects not dealt with by Galen; criticizing Galen and using non-Greek models such asIndian ones. The compiling and innovation stage continued for at least five centuries (earlyfourth century (H) to the middle of the ninth century/centuries 10-15); and it can beconsidered as the Islamic medicine era in the general history of medicine. In this stage themost important differences in the field of general principles were: separation of medicineand philosophy; dominance of the medicine’s scientific section in comparison with itstheoretical one; surpassing mere logical reasoning by experience and experiment; and thepriority of scientific clinical observations to analogical theories. Therefore, Islamicmedicine separated from philosophy and only dealt with medical subjects and physiciansstarted to expand medical branches and specializing them via writing and practicing.Moreover, it enabled them to correct predecessors’ mistakes and add many new subjects.