Beyond Relay-Race and Precursorism: Challenges in Situating Islamic Medicine in the Historiography of Western Science
by Nahyan Fancy, University of Exeter
The category of "Western science" and its standard narrative creates myriad problems for both understanding the development of medicine in Islamic societies themselves, and its relationship to Renaissance and early modern Latin medicine. It is of course true that the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle were fundamental building blocks for the medical theoretical tradition in Islamic societies. It is also true that the Arabic translations and engagements with these works were translated into Latin and played an important role in the development of medical theory and practice in Latin European societies. The problem of course is that the standard narrative of Western science makes a number of assumptions that restrict investigations and the teaching of medicine in Islamic societies within the larger rubric of relaying Greek thought to the Latin West and/or mildly anticipating some later Renaissance development. It also presumes that there was no movement of texts after 1200 from Arabic into Latin, and so also confines the teaching of medicine in Islamic societies to this pre-1200 period, often misrepresented as a "Golden Age" after which a decline follows. Using the example of developments in pulse theory, I shall try to see if we can find a way past these constraints.
