Medical Epistemology in Arabic Discourse: From Greek Sources to the Arabic Commentary Tradition

The Hippocratic Aphorisms enjoyed enormous popularity in the Arabo-Islamic medical tradition: physicians and the general public learnt them by heart; whole disciplines were defined by them; they stand at the beginning of many nosological concepts (as the case of melancholy illustrates); and they offer many sophisticated discussions of questions of medical epistemology. Because these Aphorisms were pithy sayings that are sometimes quite obscure or succinct, they elicited a large amount of exegesis. A case in point is the very first aphorism, which states that ‘experiment is treacherous and decision difficult’. It spawned a significant amount of debate about the nature of ‘experiment’ (or experience) and how to use it in order to establish medical knowledge, as Franz Rosenthal has already argued some 50 years ago in a seminal article. Recently, the whole commentary tradition has been made available in preliminary electronic editions (see Pormann, Karimullah 2017). The present chapter will focus on a number of examples for various problems of medical epistemology as they are discussed in this exegetical corpus. Examples will include more theoretical discussions about the nature of medical knowledge and practical ones about the efficaciousness of certain drugs or therapeutical processes. This will show that far from being a stagnant body of knowledge, the Arabic commentaries on the Aphorisms are a locus of intense intellectual debate and medical innovation.