This is a review of Ibn al Quff's account of surgical pain relief in his surgical book Al Omdah, in which he mentioned the word anesthetic (Al moukhadder) and the involvement of physician (al tabbaaee) to give mixture of drugs to prevent pain in a surgical condition to relieve the patient from pain or to make surgical management possible. Hich indicated one rare occasion to such description in Arabic medical texts. Methods of administration of these drugs were inhalation, ingestion and by rectal suppositories. The drugs used in anesthetic sponges include all the drugs that are recorded in the modern literature of anesthesia. They are as follows: opium, mandrake, Hyocymus albus, belladonna, Cannabis sativus, Cannabis indica, wild lettuce. The anesthetic sponge, mentioned in many references as an inhalation method, may be of symbolic value to surgery.
I was unfamiliar with "wild lettuce", but apparently its secretions are somewhat similar in effect to opium.
Scopolamine, derived from Hyoscymus Albus is used today for the exact same reasons. The plant is called henbanes, and that name historically refers to a few different plants, but all seem to be exhibiting similar effects.
Indeed, Latuca serriola is named "wild opium lettuce" and quite effective for pain relief. 'The sap is a natural latex that can either be taken in pills or smoked in a pipe. It appears to cause a numbing sensation that spreads through the body. It does not normally impart a euphoric "high" feeling.'
Opium lettuce does not contain opium. It is also effective against coughs; powdered, it can treat sunburns, and it has probably been in use for eons.
I really want to read these texts by early Islamic physicians/polymaths but it's tricky to find translations (though in fairness I haven't dug as deeply as I probably could've). There's some fantastic history there, and I would love to compare them to Renaissance and pre-Renaissance writings. If anyone has any book recommendations or journal publications I'd love to hear them.
I'm native speaker and find reading those manuscript hard, they are like an exclusive club, manuscript scattered in libraries around the world and you have to know the right people or who to ask to get what you want.
Yeah, I imagine it'd be like reading Latin, I even struggle with English texts written only 4 centuries ago, forget 14 centuries ago. Access is a good point too, I think Medieval and Renaissance texts tend to accumulate at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, etc, at least in the Anglosphere.
the cool thing is that written Arabic, for the most part, does not suffer from that.
A speaker can pick up a book written in the 11th century and find that the grammar, words, structure are all consistent and understandable.
it isn't like English and something like the The Canterbury Tales
It goes even further than that to a certain extent.
In a past wikipedia rabbit hole I was surprised to recognize and understand some (transliterated) sumerian words! Suddenly being thrown 8000 years in the past is not the catastrophic scenario I was worrying about.
True, What i find hard is reading or figuring out the word, it's really easy to read the published book of a manuscript, but only people with experience can read the manuscript. For example these words: Fine, Fun and Fan are all written as Fn, we understand the 3 words but which one they mean depend on the context of speaking
Latin is largely similar due to an obsession with preserving the language dating all the way back to antiquity.
I think the big difference with English (and European vernacular at large) is that spelling was standardized surprisingly late, no earlier than the the 16th century, but with many languages several hundred years later. Before that you had the weird-looking "Thys boke is myne"-style spelling.
Sounds weird when you point it out, but the first English dictionary (the "Table Alphabeticall") was printed around the same time Shakespeare died.
Anecdotes and Antidotes: A Medieval Arabic History of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah.
I started reading it last year and got distracted and didn't finish it, but it's very interesting. It's basically a chronicle of all the physicians this guy knew of. There's some genuinely interesting history in there, like how much they respected Galen and still referenced those works. And then there's some esoteric stuff like diagnosing a sick sultan by looking at a vial of his urine, or copious warnings of not to have sex with older women as they'll steal your life-force. Also oddly specific accounts of how much these physicians were paid and what in.
Hopefully the sort of thing you're looking for. I just found it in a book store one day.
Translation wise, if you do not read Arabic then you could give ChatGPT a try. I am currently using GPT4 to clean-up+merge several OCRs of a Latin text and then translate it to English: while not perfect the result is very good.
Once ChatGPT opens up the image analysis support of GPT-4, you can probably upload images of manuscripts that you can find online and get them translated.
Why Islamic specifically? What differences do you see from the above linked Arab Christian's writings and what Muslims might write? Is there a specific difference in theology betwen Arab Muslims and Arab Christians that translates to physicians/polymaths that you are interested to explore? I know there are artistic differences but I'm not aware of medical/mathematics ones?
My read of the word "Islamic" in that case was, uh, for want of a better word, inclusive, in that I took it to refer to "the culture that was flourishing in the Arabic world in the 7th C". Given when the subject of the original article was born (c. 630), it is, I think, both harmless and descriptive to conflate the terms Arabic and Islamic: Islam was born in Arabia and was at that time purely Arabic, and it spread quickly enough that most/all of Arabia was Islamic during the physician's lifetime.
I don't know how fruitful it is to attempt to determine the extent to which the respect for knowledge then prevalent was a result of Islam or of other factors. The simple fact is that for a period that covered at least the physician's life, preservation and extension of knowledge was prized in that area.
Contrast that with the predominantly Christian cultures to the northwest-ish, that were at that time far more concerned with dogma, their own intellectual flourishing still a few centuries. What we in the west know of the ancient Greeks we owe to the Arabs, who were predominantly muslims, of that period.
It's far more complicated than that, of course, but to this day, writers conflate "Islamic" and "Arabic" when referring to that period (cf, e.g., [1]), and I think forgivably so. I think.
(I hesitate because on the one hand it is both difficult and fraught to tease apart the various influences, on the other hand western society was predominantly Christian and many of the western values I cherish arose and flourished in those Christian societies, on the third hand there was definitely a Jewish influence in some of those societies and an Islamic in other, on the fourth hand I share many of those values despite being none of Christian, Jewish, or anything else theistic, and on the fifth I am often irked when Christians claim (wish I could find a source, but alas, I cannot, but I've seen this many times) that those values could NOT have arisen elsewhere... not enough hands to balance these complexities.)
(I am often reminded of how applicable to social discourse is Postel's Law, written in regard to TCP, "be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" - be liberal, be open in one's interpretation of the wording of others, seek neither offence nor exclusion when one can charitably and gracefully assume none was meant. Nope, he didn't mean it that, but it does seem a useful heuristic.)
For those interested in the culture of the era, Islam did play a strong influence on technological development.
The earlier form of Islamic philosophy was mostly for rulings, e.g. "if X is haram, and Y is similar to X, then is Y haram?" The logical framework they had was Aristotelian.
Then you had the Avicenna era around 10th century. Avicenna was a healer who found the Aristotelian logic lacking, and added more on top of that. It was a little pre-scientific method, things like syndromes where you have XYZ observed in ABC and ACD observed in VWX, and then link A and C to X.
Then around 11th century, Al-Ghazali came in with "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" and roasted Avicennan philosophy, by roasting the Greek philosophy it was built upon. Something about it not being compatible with Islamic theology.
There were some heated discussions. Al-Ghazali also criticized debate for the sake of debate, which philosophers were prone to do. He encouraged people to demonstrate the proof and leave no room for doubt. So people started adopting empirical science over philosophy. Things like astronomy and medicine became the battlegrounds to prove the superior philosopher, which might also be why you see so many polymaths in this period.
There were no major philosophical changes after al-Ghazali, and only in the last two centuries with the decline of Islamic influence did people start looking to Greek philosophy again.
Ibn al Quff was born in the 13th century and likely influenced by the latter stages of Islamic philosophy.
The average person in the West today somehow thinks that Ancient Greeks entered a time machine and reappeared later in the Renaissance.
Some get angry when you mention that Europe received the torch of knowledge directly from the Islamic world via Spain and Italy, because it invalidates this vision of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnA-ESWcPs
The average person in the Islamic world gets upset if you point out that the "Golden Age of Islam" is more due to the advanced cultures of the countries conquered and appropriated under the Islamic banner. There was quite an advanced world before 7th century AD i.e. before the advent of Islam. Persia, Mesopotamia, The Levant, The Mediterranean, Greece, Turkey, India, China etc. all hosted advanced cultures. Islamic conquest/trade acted as a conduit in the exchange and amplification of ideas from various parts of the world to Europe who then took off impressively to birth the "Modern World".
The Islamic world before and after the Mongol invasion are completely different. Many of the polymaths and philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age were Persian.
But that is the thing; it wasn't a two-way street. When a country/culture is conquered by the sword, they don't have a say in how their culture is suppressed/destroyed/distorted; the conqueror can rewrite history as he chooses and that is exactly what has happened with Islam. In fact some folks have called Islam as merely an "Intermediate Civilization" between Greek/Roman and Renaissance periods (see Between Hellenism and Renaissance—Islam, The Intermediate Civilization by S.D.Goitein).
An analogy that i make is - Arabs : 7th-12th centuries :: Mongols : 13th-15th centuries.
Both were "primitive" in comparison to the cultures they conquered, but were indispensable in acting as a conduit for the spread of ideas from one part of the world to another.
Two-way can come in the sense as the main thing conquests spread was dominance of Islamic religion in a region, even if conversions didn’t not occur until later. The conquest of the Sassanian Empire for example would later lead to things like the prolific grammarian of Arabic Sibawayh, a Muslim of descent from what is now Iran. While he was not even from Arabic nor a native speaker of Arabic, he became one of the best Arabic grammarians in his quest for Islamic knowledge. Without the expansion of the Islamic nations, we would not expect to see this. Ultimately religion became a uniting force among disparate peoples, binding them into one Muslim nation.
Islamic religion had become a uniting force only by "spreading by the sword" since in the original form as conceived by the Arabs it was merely a simplistic dogma tuned to their needs, times and culture.
It was the conquered cultures which brought in a huge Knowledge Base into it which was then sold under the Islamic/Arabic banner.
But because of the inherent intolerant nature of Islam (as the linked article in my previous comment points out about the rejection of Mutazilism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27tazilism) Islam inevitably declined into the mess that it is today. Contrast it against the spread, stability and popularity of Buddhism and you can see the stark difference. The latter is constructive while the former is destructive, the latter harmoniously marries Native culture to Religion (eg. Buddhism in Sri Lanka vs. China vs. Japan etc.) while the former is consumed by hatred, infighting and identity crisis.
You are sorely wrong and ignorant as to the topics you discuss. To wallow in bias is to stay lost.
Conversions to Islam under Islamic empires like Umayyads and Abbasids did not in general occur by the “sword”. You can look up the historical demographics, it took a long time for some areas like the Levant and even Egypt for a majority of the population to convert. Conversions occurred for a variety of reasons, but being force by the sword is definitely not a major factor. Even still today many places retained their minority religion populations. As for blend of culture and religion, you can easily say same for Islamic cultures which harmonized with cultures as widely as Indonesia to West and South Asian under its fold.
As for mutazilism, that has nothing to do with the topic, and the mutazilites themselves had people killed for not following their beliefs when they influenced the ruler, so their downfall was only by what they perpetuated.
Next you sell Buddhism as perfect at peace, yet there is well known infighting between various branches in Buddhism. Not to mention it does not end ethnic strife (see the genocide of Rohingya in Burma).
As expected, you are merely a "Islamic Apologist" with little knowledge of History and the usual twisting of facts to suit your agenda. There is so much to be said here that entire books have been written on the subject (i.e. on its backwardness and destructiveness) and enlightened individuals from the Islamic community itself are calling for reform if it is to stay relevant. Instead of regurgitating the details from the many sources, i will list a few sources themselves for you to study and educate yourself.
5) Tons of Youtube videos on this subject which you can search for yourself (start with Pervez Hoodbhoy). If i start listing them here it might go against HN guidelines and get me banned.
Finally, coming to your specific comment i will just highlight a few points;
>Conversions occurred for a variety of reasons, but being force by the sword is definitely not a major factor.
Absolutely wrong; it was the single biggest factor in the spread of Islam; even today forced conversions are a reality in Islamic countries.
>Even still today many places retained their minority religion populations.
Laughable! In every Muslim majority state, minorities have been persecuted/forcibly converted almost to extinction. You just have to look at the data for some Islamic countries.
>Next you sell Buddhism as perfect at peace, yet there is well known infighting between various branches in Buddhism.
Nothing close to what happens between sects within Islam and between Islam and other religions.
In today's world and times, Islam has become a byword for Extremism/Terrorism/Intellectual backwardness/Lack of Scientific temper/Lack of development in all factors and in general everything negative. Many Muslim intellectuals are themselves fighting against this and you would do well to read their works/sayings instead of living in a fantasy world.
> Absolutely wrong; it was the single biggest factor in the spread of Islam; even today forced conversions are a reality in Islamic countries.
Perhaps you do not know so I will give you a history lesson.
Firstly, some of the early Umayyads were reluctant to encourage conversion to Islam for tax reasons, as a tax was levied on the non-Muslim minorities under protection of the Umayyad empire. The concept of Dhimmah let non-Muslims live peacefully under protection of the empire in exchange for recognizing their authority and paying a poll tax, jizyah. However, many people willingly converted to Islam, and the result is that some of the greatest Islamic scholars came from non-Arab lineage.
Next, Islamic conversions occurred in the Indian subcontinent in large part due to Sufis and merchants. This is similar for Indonesia and China which contacts with Islam came through merchants.
Next, the much of the Middle East converted to Islam far later than the original conquests by Islamic empires. You can read more here in this Oxford news article, so certainly you won’t be making accusations of apologism: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/how-did-christian-middle...
> Laughable! In every Muslim majority state, minorities have been persecuted/forcibly converted almost to extinction. You just have to look at the data for some Islamic countries.
The fact that religious minorities survived to the modern day in the Middle East is proof that Islamic conversions by and large did not happen by force. Nearly 20% of Egypt is Christian, as a result of the Coptic community that remains in Egypt. You can compare this to European conquests of the Americas, where indigenous religions were nearly wiped out forcibly. Or see the Spanish Inquisition where Spain expelled, interrogated, and executed Jews and Muslims.
Similarly, in the Balkans ruled by the Ottomans, there was no large scale systematic genocide of non-Muslims over hundreds of years of history. Early nationalism caused a lot of strife in the region and ethnic cleansing, but the fact that Balkan Christians remained is because forced conversion to Islam was not the primary cause of conversion to Islam. In fact, Bosnians converted to Islam probably because their form of Christianity was closer to Islamic teachings, compared to the others Balkan folk around them.
Yes, there were cases of forced conversion in different places, but in no way was this the primary way for people to become Muslims over history.
Anyways, your main argument was based around forced conversion being the primary way people entered Islam, but this is without a doubt false.
As for the sources you sent, these are very biased sources and this is outside of the topic at hand. Islam has remained relevant for hundreds of years, and will remain relevant for Muslims, regardless of what some people engaged in presentism will say.
I hope you can learn to leave your ignorance and accept truth, I think I have decisively sent you a lot of examples on why forced conversions were not the main cause to enter Islam. Let’s be honest.
It is breathtaking to see Islamic Apologists tying themselves into knots to try and cherry-pick only those articles/quotes which is favorable to their agenda. The reality is far more complex and not favorable to Islam.
The sources i have quoted are mainly from Wikipedia which is a collection of data with no bias on its own. The fact that you chose to dismiss it completely says a lot about your agenda and ignorance.
At the same time, however, the Islamic tradition records that Muhammad gave the pagans of Mecca and later all of Arabia only two choices: conversion to Islam or the sword. As such, people not considered "people of the book", id est Jews or Christians, are on this example to be given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. In many cases, such as when Muslims found themselves ruling over a polytheist population in India, the forced conversion of so many people has been seen to be impossible, and in its place these people have been offered dhimmitude. These practical exceptions did not, however, change the opinion of the fuquhaa' that all non-believers who are not Jews or Christians ought to be given the choice of Islam or death, forced conversion in effect.
And there is more on that page; Nevertheless the relationship between Islam and Christianity (i consider Christian Sahner as trying to whitewash this relationship since his chair/research is funded by Islamic countries) was quite different than between Islam and Other religions and it is in the latter accounts (mainly from the Indian subcontinent) that one can see the full horrors of Islam on display (start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Hindus).
None of your data points hold up to scrutiny, you have merely stated what you believe, while the evidence from the other side is what i have listed in my comments. You need to go through the sources and then change your worldview w.r.t. Islam if at all you care for the Truth.
Most Arabic speaking scientific knowledge that was generated is Persian, I have not seen it generated from other areas from my research into Arabic polymaths. Baghdad would have been important too, but we know the story of the Mongols. A lot of the mathematical knowledge is also found in ancient India. For the longest I thought Arabic numerals were... Arabic.
Depends on which part of the Islamic world you're looking at. Al Andalus was a more Arab speaking part but India was definitely more Persian speaking because of the Turkish influence. Knowledge of both Persian and Arabic among the educated elite was common.
> ..."Islamic"...I took it to refer to "the culture that was flourishing in the Arabic world in the 7th C".
There is unfortunately no convenient single term to refer to the intellectual milieu of the Middle East in that period. Among historians, I think the most commonly used terms are "Hellenic" for those communities publishing in Greek, and "Arabic" once they had switched to that language. Just remember that not everyone publishing in Greek was a Greek and not everyone publishing in Arabic was a Muslim.
The term you are looking for is “Islamicate”, coined by historian Marshall Hodgkin iirc. It refers to places where Islam is culturally , but not specific to Muslims or the religion of Islam per se. e.g Maimonides, a Jew in Muslim Spain, would be classified as an “Islamicate” philosopher.
According to his Wikipedia page, Marshall Hodgson (sp) introduced "Islamicate" to describe non-religious aspects of a predominantly Islamic culture. I'm here following Bernard Lewis in using the Hellenistic/Arabic distinction to cover the situation in the Near East where communities of Jews, Christians, Muslims, etc. transitioned from publishing in Greek to Arabic, without otherwise changing their cultural identities. Greek and Arabic were the languages of publication, not daily conversation in academies. The bulk of scientific writing in the early Islamic era came from Jewish and Christian academies, so historians being careful about terminology shy away from calling it "Islamic".
Whoops, that's not what I meant at all. I really just wanted to avoid excluding Persians like Avicenna/Ibn Sina. I actually wasn't aware of al-Quff before this post, nor that he was a Christian before your comment. Goes to show I really have a lot of reading to catch up on.
The Vatican still has some Ibn al Quff's books,Ibn al Quff (1233 - 1286)a Jordanian who converted to Christianity ,lived studied medicine-1252- in Damascus, and died there.
Entirely off-topic, but I immediately noticed that the website uses Fira Sans for all the text. I appreciate open-access journals using open-source fonts.
Interestingly it was a Russian doctor who started using anaesthesia in the Crimean war (the English were against it at first believing in the stiff upper lip during amputations). Oh yes every new war is just a repeat of an old war.
As far as I can tell this was the 1200’s[1] and this doctor and author explained how to use a lot of our modern anesthesia such as opium, a few types of cannabis, and others.
1] ChatGPT says ~1218 while I calculated 1242, but I don’t know this calendar.
The title of the actual article gives the exact years in question. The surgeon was alive from 1232 to 1286. The years shown use the "CE/BCE" notation, which is just an alternate to writing "AD/BC". The numbers themselves correspond to the same time.
The line between "so sedated you don't feel your guts being cut open" and "so sedated you stop breathing" is frighteningly thin and requires a constant, careful, measured supply of anesthetic. In modern surgeries, there is one guy who goes to school for years to do nothing but monitor the patient's vitals and adjust the flow accordingly. In al Quff's day, I imagine such reliable precision was difficult or impossible, and you'd rather err on the side of pain than death.
Which is to say, there's a very real chance of your patient waking up mid-surgery and freaking the fuck out, and you want to be prepared for that.
I've woken up in surgery and though I didn't freak out (or feel much of anything), I still remember the look of horror on the anesthetist's face when he noticed.
If, however, the patient could not keep still because of the intensity of pain or because he is an infant or a child, and so on, he should be held in a fixed position by somebody else.
They still do this with children -- for example: strap them down, give local anesthesia, apply stitches to a cut that needs to be stitched up.
This is a review of Ibn al Quff's account of surgical pain relief in his surgical book Al Omdah, in which he mentioned the word anesthetic (Al moukhadder) and the involvement of physician (al tabbaaee) to give mixture of drugs to prevent pain in a surgical condition to relieve the patient from pain or to make surgical management possible. Hich indicated one rare occasion to such description in Arabic medical texts. Methods of administration of these drugs were inhalation, ingestion and by rectal suppositories. The drugs used in anesthetic sponges include all the drugs that are recorded in the modern literature of anesthesia. They are as follows: opium, mandrake, Hyocymus albus, belladonna, Cannabis sativus, Cannabis indica, wild lettuce. The anesthetic sponge, mentioned in many references as an inhalation method, may be of symbolic value to surgery.
I was unfamiliar with "wild lettuce", but apparently its secretions are somewhat similar in effect to opium.