Professor Peter E Pormann from The University of Manchester says too few people realise European and Arab doctors were part of the same medical tradition which played a pivotal role in the development of medicine as we know it.
“Arabic was the scientific language which united doctors 850 year ago and which contributed to a medical discourse that went beyond country and creed,” he said. “Jew, Christian and Muslim worked together in an openness within medicine which more or less has continued to this day.”
The minute clinical observations of the clinician al-Rāzī, he says – who even once used a control group to test a medical procedure – are a 850-year-old blueprint for how doctors work today.
Al-Rāzī was one of the many clinicians to be inspired by Arabic translations, he says, making great strides in their understanding of medicine and forming the basis of what we know today.
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