ARABIAN AND MEDIEVAL SURGERY 467 



ARABIAN AND MEDIEVAL STTKGEKY 1 



By Dr. JOHN FOOTE 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 



AFTEE the conquest of Alexandria, when the victorious Mohamme- 

 dans were feeding the fires of the city baths with the priceless 

 treasures of the Alexandrian library, a young man who had been a stu- 

 dent at the now dismantled university was writing a medical work, the 

 sixth volume of which dealt with surgery. Little work has been done 

 by the Byzantine authors other than the copying of preceding works 

 which might otherwise be lost to us, and the works of Oribasius and 

 iEtius on surgery and the medical writings of Alexander of Tralles have 

 little more than their Greek contact to commend them. But the work 

 of Paul, called from his birthplace, Paul of iEgina, was more than a 

 mere copy. The rough, untutored Arabs who conquered Asia Minor, 

 were not long in being, in turn, conquered by Greek culture and Greek 

 science. Rapidly as this was assimilated, it is well to remember that an 

 important text-book on surgery had been written by one of the con- 

 quered before the Hellenization of the Arab had taken place. Gurlt con- 

 siders this a momentous work, and it describes among other things orig- 

 inal treatment for foreign bodies in the esophagus, the operation for 

 tracheotomy, and has an article on hernia. Of course this surgeon had 

 an operation for the radical cure, which included peritoneal suture and 

 drainage in its technique. Paul devised a gynecological speculum, was 

 credited with special knowledge of women's diseases, and indeed was 

 known as "The obstetritician." 



The Nestorian monks had christianized many Arabs and these 

 Christian Arabs figure most prominently in the first period of Arabian 

 medicine as both translators and practitioners. The Bachtischua family, 

 the name being derived from Bocht Jesu, servant of Jesus, had several 

 illustrious members, the first, George, being physician to the caliph El 

 Mansur at Bagdad, and his son, as well as his grandson Gabriel, serving 

 Haroun' al Easchid in a like capacity. This physician claimed to have 

 received over $10,000,000 in fees, and the largest single fee on record, 

 $125,000, is credited to him. Perhaps the best known writers of this 

 period were Serapion, the Elder, who lived during the ninth century, and 

 Honein Ben Ischak, or Johannitius, whose accurate translations of the 

 old authors caused him to be called the Erasmus of the Arabian renais- 

 sance. Serapion describes an operation for stone in the kidney in which 



1 Eead before the Medical History Club of Washington, D. C, December 27, 

 1913. 



