Authority and Truth in Islamic Medicine

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

This paper is part of a broader study of medical hermeneutics in classical Arabic. It focuses on ideas on authorship and authority among physicians writing in Arabic between the 9th and 13th centuries AD. Particularly, the paper explores the tension between perceptions of Hippocrates as authoritative, and a medical hermeneutics aiming to establish and understand the realities of human health and disease. Arabic physician-commentators considered Hippocrates’ works as medically accurate and worthy of commentary, yet they regularly encountered a Hippocratic text that did not correspond to their understanding of the medical world. This posed an exegetical challenge, as commentators aimed to interpret the Hippocratic text in ways that acknowledged its medical value, yet were philological sound and grounded in contemporary standards of medical rational empiricism. To complicate their task further, commentators upheld strict conventions of politeness in the genre of the sharḥ, which denounced direct criticism of the author. This led them to devise interpretive strategies which allowed them to preserve both their standing as grammarians and the reputation of Hippocrates, while communicating their own medical understandings as physicians.

Elaine van Dalen is an assistant professor of Classical Islamic Studies in the Mesaas department at Columbia University. She obtained her Phd in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester in 2017. She works on the history of medicine and science in the classical Islamic World (9th-13th century AD). She is interested in the translation and transmission of medical ideas, especially from Greek into Arabic, as well as questions of epistemology, hermeneutics, and philology. She is currently completing her first monograph on The Arabic Hippocrates which will focus on the Arabic reception of Greek medical works and offer a history of medical interpretation and explanation in the Classical Islamic period.

zoom link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/95934960500#success