Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah

Abstract

Hitherto, research on Arabic pharmacy and pharmacology has largely been based on the study of pharmacopoeias. While practical in nature, it is not clear to what extent the recipes in the pharmacopoeias were in fact used. The Cairo Genizah, the most famous and best preserved of the many depositories of documents written by medieval Jewish communities, provides us with a unique glimpse of practical medicine, by virtue of the prescriptions found there. These prescriptions reflect the medical reality that actually existed in the eastern Mediterranean basin in the 10th-13th centuries, and will be compared especially to pharmacopoeias known to have been used, or even deriving from, members of the Genizah community, such as Minhāj al-dukkān, al-Dustūr al-bīmāristanī and the works of Maimonides. We will examine three prescriptions in depth, attempting to answer the following questions: Who wrote these prescriptions? Who made them up, i.e. prepared the medical recipes? What can be learnt from the prescriptions about medicine, public/community health, the use of materia medica? To what extent are these prescriptions original, i.e. how do they reflect the relationship between medieval medical theory and practice? Pharmacology in medieval Arabic medicinePharmacology is considered, along with ophthalmology, to be one of the medical fields in which the Arabs excelled: these are the two areas that developed their own specialist monographic literature, in addition to chapters in medical compendia. 1 From quite an early stage, pharmacy and medicine were separate professions. 2 Books on medicine were among the first scientific works to be translated into Arabic during the translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries CE, 3 while the range of materia medica known to the Arabs greatly surpassed that of the classical world, due to the extent of the Islamic empires and their trade contacts with the Indian and Chinese medical 1