Thursday, June 11, 2015 @ 8:00 am-5:00 pm
Professor Emilie Savage-Smith looks at the surgeons and physicians of medieval Iraq
By Ali Khadr
Annual Bonham-Carter Lecture 2015
Baghdad led the world in medicine and surgery during the Abbasid period. Following organised efforts to determine what earlier societies knew of medical care, Baghdadi physicians produced a rich and innovative medical literature while government officials demonstrated serious interest in public health. Muslim, Christian and Jewish physicians worked together in hospitals and served as court physicians. In this illustrated lecture for BISI, Professor Emilie Savage-Smith gave examples of the treatments available in Baghdad during the ninth and tenth centuries for ailments such as asthma, hay fever, sore throat, infected tonsils, missing teeth, eye inflammations, cataracts, broken bones, embedded arrowheads, indigestion, diarrhoea, and dislocated shoulders.
Biography
Professor Savage-Smith recently retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. Her current projects include: The Raised-Up Roof and the Laid-Down Bed: Stars, Maps and History in Medieval Islam (with Y. Rapoport); a study of the treatment of cataracts in the medieval Islamic world; and A Literary History of Medicine: The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah (d. 1270), for which Professor Savage-Smith received a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award.
Photo: A physician with two patients painted in Baghdad in 1224, from an Arabic translation of a Greek treatise on medicinal substances (Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institute)
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BISI works to advance research and public education about Iraq in all of the arts, humanities and social sciences subjects, and enables exchange and collaboration between UK and Iraqi academics. Our grants and scholarships have helped the fund the following research projects.