Europes Debt to Persia by Reeves Minou;

Author:Reeves, Minou;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Garnet Publishing (UK) Ltd
Published: 2014-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Merit of Jundishapur’s Medical Family, the Greek-, Syriac- and Persian-Speaking Bakhtishus

The merit for the transmission to Baghdad of Graeco-Persian medicine, practised with such expertise at the Jundishapur Medical School, goes first and foremost to the Nestorian Persian medical family, the Bakhtishus. It was thanks to them that the transmission had begun in 765 ce, a century before the rise of Rhazes and two centuries before that of Avicenna. Jurjis Bakhtishu, the chief- physician and senior lecturer at Jundishapur’s medical school, had been called to Baghdad to be court physician to Caliph Al Mansur.17 He had brought with him two of his former and most gifted students, Ibrahim and Issa Chouhlatsa, now qualified physicians, while leaving his nephew Sarguis, also a physician, to administer the school in his absence.18 However, Jurjis was not to return to Jundishapur for several years and when he did he died and was never to see Baghdad again. His major service to Baghdad as the new centre of learning had been the creation of Al Rashid Hospital, a duplicate of Jundishapur, to which a medical school and a pharmacy were attached, and which as a prototype was to spread across the entire Abbasid Empire, reaching Spain.

Once Al Rashid Hospital had been built under Jurjis’s supervision, he urged the Zoroastrian director of Jundishapur’s hospital, Dahachtak, a specialist in internal diseases, to join him in Baghdad and to run the new hospital for him.19 But Dahachtak refused to leave Jundishapur and suggested another noted physician for the post. The candidate was a member of the respectable Jewish Persian medical family, the Musavis, who had acquired prominence alongside the Bakhtishus. Jurjis also asked one of the best graduates of the year, the Zoroastrian physician Taherbakht, to come to Baghdad and to assist Musavi as his deputy. These were all distinguished Persian medical scientists with considerable publications who brought a whole influx of Persian ideas with them. At the same time they transmitted the Persian ethos of science without boundaries. In Jundishapur, Zoroastrian, Christian Nestorian, Jewish and Greek scientists had worked together as a team and it was precisely in such a collegial atmosphere that they continued to work in Baghdad.

Jurjis himself had had many publications to his credit, of which his Pandectae Medicinae and Liber Memorialis were the most significant.20 Dahashtak had written an important compendium on apothecaries entitled Tazkareh [Passport], which was later, like the works of Jurjis, translated into Latin and is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The Musavis, still active at Jundishapur, produced brilliant physicians, one of whom, Yuhanna Musavi (d. 857 ce), known in Latin circles as Mesuë, was the teacher of the celebrated Jundishapur physician and prolific translator of scientific texts, Hunayn Ebadi [Ibn Ishaq in Arabic and Johannitius in Latin], before they were both called to Baghdad by their sponsor, Jurjis Bakhtishu’s son, Jibril. Musavi’s medical publications before and after arriving in Baghdad, most of which are extant in Latin, are:

1 Book of Fevers

2 Medical Curiosities

3 Demonstration

4 Complement

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