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Islamic medical poetry

Date: March 26, 2003 | 21 Muharram 1424 Hijriah
Blog: veiled4allah
Subjects: art, poetry, medicine, philosophy
Along with calligraphy and architecture, poetry is one of the major Islamic art forms. Mystical poetry, like that of Jalaluddin Rumi, is very popular in the West right now, but it is not the only kind of poetry produced by Muslims. While searching for good web resources on Islamic poetry, I stumbled upon a little-known genre: medical poetry.

Medical poetry was not an attempt to wax poetic about the joys of medicine. Rather, it was meant as a teaching tool, to put the basic concepts of medicine in a form that was easy for students to remember. The best-known example of this was Poem on Medicine by the great philosopher and physician Avicenna (Abu Ali Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, 980-1037).The poem does not seem to be available online but the link provides some information about it.

There are a large number of biographies of Avicenna available online, some focused on his career as a physician and some focused on his career as a philosopher. You can also check out this large list of links about Islamic medicine.
~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a member of the reality-based community, at 06:58 AM

Comments

sarah said: Total comments: 1  

Neat. I'd heard of medical poetry in medieval europe, and I wondered where they got the idea from. Does it predate the times you gave in other cultures? or is this when it was invented?

~ Posted at March 27, 2003 04:26 AM | Comment Permalink
moderator Al-Munaqabah said: Total comments: 996   gold stargold stargold stargold stargold star

Sorry for the delay in responding to you, Sarah. I missed your comment at first in all the others. I don't know anything about Christian or European medical poetry so I really can't answer your question. I would be surprised if it predated Islamic medical poetry, but I don't know for sure. The poem by Avicenna, which seems to date to around 1000 C.E., seems to be the earliest known Islamic example.

~ Posted at March 29, 2003 11:14 AM | Comment Permalink
sarah said: Total comments: 1  

I did a google search on 'medical' and 'poetry' and you were the fourth entry. It looks like the latin stuff I'd heard of were translations of Islamic texts. I'm wondering if Hippocrates wrote in verse... as that would be a greek anticedent, right? Gotta look more. Wish I could read arabic, but I'm having enough trouble learning French. And Arabic speaking friends laugh at my French as it is.

I'm no medical person, but I'm in to poetry, and I love the idea of poetry being used in contexts such as medicine.

Thanks for your response.

~ Posted at March 29, 2003 11:42 AM | Comment Permalink

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