On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, Vol. I

Furthermore, they found the entire method and art of medicine so described and composed by Galen that it seemed able to be aptly compared with the composition of a discipline elegantly established by philosophers, where one thing is woven from another, the latter conforms to the former, and everything, finally, is fit among itself and, as it were, joined together. And the very fact that they saw medicine recalled to the principles, perpetuity, and consistency of philosophy wonderfully enticed the studies of those whose minds were so constituted that they sought to explain the truth of things less through experience from nature itself than through reasoning ordered by doctrine and perpetual precepts. For these reasons, it is hard to say how much care and industry the Arabs, after they learned of Galen’s doctrine through the Syrians, put into ensuring that his books—as many as had escaped the injury of time—were sought out, translated into Arabic, explained, and disseminated, both those he wrote concerning medicine and those concerning philosophy, especially regarding the art of dialectic. Those who deserve the most merit in this matter are the physicians of the Bachtischua family who flourished in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, then Alkindus and Johannitius (whose name among the Arabs is Honein), a most noble physician who flourished in the ninth century, and his sons, grandsons, and students, who translated many other works of the Greeks—such as Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Paul, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Archimedes, and Euclid—as well as Galen, into either Syriac or Arabic, or corrected and purged of their errors whatever was already translated into Arabic10. After them, many others appeared who, following in their footsteps, adopted Galen as the supreme authority in cultivating medicine, just as they did Aristotle in philosophy, among whom Rhazes (9th century) stood out, and Avicenna (11th century) and the subsequent Averroes, both of whom attained a most famous name in both disciplines, though the former more in medicine and the latter in philosophy11.

10) Daremberg, ibid., p. 267.
11) Regarding how zealously the Arabs labored in collecting the books of Galen,