Medical Works of Rhazes (The Comprehensive Book)

Two methods of healing.

The method of healing consists chiefly of two things: the precepts, which show the indications for curing, and the remedies, which banish diseases. You will draw the former most exquisitely and sincerely from Galen, Hippocrates, and the other Greeks—although Avicenna, Rhazes, and the other Arabs are not infants in this regard. The latter, however, which considers and rightly applies medicines, can be gathered not only from the Greeks but also from the Arabs. Both the Greeks and the Arabs have diligently investigated both simple and compound medicines to banish the injury of diseases, committed them to writing, and left them to posterity. It will be our task to recall them to use with judgment and industry, to make their faculties explored by us, and to combine the currently practiced method of healing with their method of curing as much as is possible. For those young, inexperienced physicians who rashly separate these in their so-called "practices," and follow no guide, stumble everywhere and confuse square things with round ones. Among those who can be safely imitated in curative medicine, I have heard more than a thousand times with these very ears—by the persuasion of Mesuë and my teachers, who were most excellent in science and skill (Ioan. Falcone; D. Gryphio, Chancellor of his most celebrated and ancient academy; Dionysius Tremuletus; and Ioan. Scyronius, physicians most learned and exercised in practice, and men of incredible keenness of judgment) and by many other most eminent professors of the medical schools when I was there—that Rhazes is the leader. For he departs almost not at all from the healing method of the ancients, and he returns what he received from them with great interest, with the highest fidelity and brevity; and he follows the indications for curing and the ways of applying remedies that are least erroneous, supported by reason and experience, as if taken from a most rich storehouse of Galen, Hippocrates, and the monuments of others. These can be emulated in practical medicine with great praise and no small benefit to the sick. For almost everything he breathes from every side draws its foundation and reason not so much from those first four elements or physical principles, but from use and experience, the mistress of things. There is no elegance of words or sentences here, but the weight of the things he treats, and the truth with the greatest brevity. For he attempted to gather almost all the medical monuments of Hippocrates and Galen, scattered in various books, into one bundle, as it were, with many experiments added here and there, by which he performed infinite and admirable cures in the so-called practical act. That, indeed, is held by me as the greatest thing of all, because it makes the skill of healing safer and shorter. You will find almost nothing idle in this work, and no rambling at all. In Galen, on the contrary—if I may say so with the pardon of those who have sworn by his words so that they wish to look at, read, hear, and even breathe nothing else—there is often an excessive and entirely unnecessary prolixity. Since, however, as Hippocrates testifies, "Life is short, and art is long" the famous aphorism Ars longa, vita brevis, it will be altogether worth the effort to seek such concise commentaries and aphoristic doctrine, rather than to follow with anxiety those verbose and puffed-up—not to say often confused, as it seems to some—commentaries, despising all other things. Hence the amplitude of the art, which exceeds the life of man, can hardly ever reach its end.