The Transmission of Arabic Science in the Middle Ages: Translation, Expansion, and Legacy

The Arabs have written one of the most golden pages of the history of science, for being the transmitters and preservers of the thought and knowledge of Antiquity, especially of the Greeks, to the Europe of the Renaissance across three phases or stages.

With the patronage of the Abbasid caliphs, the labour of translation of the principal works of the ancient cultures in the fields of philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, pharmacopoeia, botany, and so on, begins around the middle of the 8th century of the Christian era, under the patronage of the famous House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) of Baghdad, a mixture of library, academy, and translation centre. The translation movement was not a spontaneous affair but a state-sponsored enterprise, and its scale was unprecedented: Greek, Persian, and Indian works were rendered into Arabic on a scale that had no parallel in the ancient world. In the middle of the 9th century, approximately, the Arabs—who had already assimilated and adapted the ancient knowledge from India and Persia as well as the classical inheritance from Greece—began extending this legacy with their important findings and contributions, in a period of creative activity without precedent that would last approximately until the end of the 12th century, though there are later exceptions. Finally, all this scientific knowledge was transmitted to Christian Europe through the translations made from Arabic to Latin in Spain, at the famous Translators' School of Toledo, and in Sicily, at the School of Salerno, during the 12th and 13th centuries.

Arab-Islamic medieval medicine is highly influenced by Galen and closely linked with pharmacopoeia. All the relevant works of medicine written in the Arabic language in the Middle Ages contain pharmacological treatises on simple and compound remedies and on the preparation of these remedies, with allusion to the diseases that they treat and cure. Medicine and pharmacy became independent disciplines from the 12th century; and, even then, books continued to emphasize the importance of remedies and drugs in the treatment of diseases and contained chapters on pharmacopoeia. In addition, the Arabs practised Hippocratic medicine and considered pharmacopoeia to be a basis of therapeutics together with dietetics and, later, surgery. Under their influence, pharmacy reached a high level of mathematical precision, calculating the degrees of action of medicines and the relation between the degrees of the qualities of medicines and the degrees of their therapeutic action. The Arabs were responsible for establishing the pharmaceutical profession in their domains, independent from medicine. They also introduced apothecary shops and the places for dispensing drugs.

In this paper, I use the term "Arabic science" to refer to scientific work written in Arabic, regardless of the religious affiliation of the author, while recognizing that this tradition is often described as "Islamic science" in the scholarly literature. This survey, while wide-ranging, has necessarily been selective. It has concentrated on medicine and pharmacology, to the neglect of other fields such as astronomy, mathematics, and optics, in which Arabic scholars also made significant contributions. It has also focused on the transmission of Greek knowledge, without giving adequate attention to the contributions of Indian and Persian traditions to Arabic science. These limitations should be addressed in future research.