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and Surgery by Albucasis. Avicenna he refers to as "illustrious prince" and he is praised for the good order of his medical knowledge.
Gui was a doctor who prized scientific medical knowledge: "...(a doctor) must judge what he has learned by examining it very well for a long time and perceive all that agrees with the things which are clearly apparent, and all that disagrees with them, and thus choose the one and reject the other."
In his treatise on surgery he analyses the various kinds of medicines being currently practiced, including the disparaging of one sect whom he describes as all men at arms or Teutonic Knights - in other words, Crusaders - who treat all wounds with conjurations and liquors, oil, wool and cabbage leaves, relying on the fact that God had put His efficacy in words, in herbs and in stones. This would seem to indicate that the more rational methods of medical treatment had not completely penetrated the world of the Crusaders.
Gui also despises "...women and many ignorant ones..." who entrust those who are sick to the saints, relying on the principal that God has given the illness at His pleasure, and will take it away when it pleases Him - blessed by the name of the Lord.4
However, as the case of an unlicensed woman doctor from contemporary Paris makes clear, not all women practiced the kind of voodoo attributed to "women" by Gui. This woman when questioned about her practice describes a quasi scientific approach to doctoring. This included inspecting the urine of patients, and feeling their pulses, body and limbs as appropriate. She seems to have specialised in the treatment of ulcers, both internal and external, and to have treated her patients by administering syrups of either a comforting nature, or laxative, digestive and aromatic. One patient was treated by medicinal baths and bandaging, and the prescription of chamomile and melilot. The former is a herb commonly used today for the treatment of constipation, while the latter - possibly of Mediterranean origin although there are Northern varieties - is used as an antiseptic salve. The doctor also treated her patient by scattering herbs on charcoal so that the ill person could inhale them, or else attempting to drive out te illness from the body by inducing sweating.5
Two hundred years after the unfortunate woman's head was inscribed with that fatal cross, one therefore finds in Europe a woman practising medicine that Thabit would have found quite in accordance with his own reasoned methodology.
1. Gabrieli, Arab Historians, p.77.
2. Aziz, Crusade, Commerce and Culture, pp.232-4.
3. F.N. Robinson (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer Oxford University Press, London, 1970, p.662.
4. J.B.Ross and M.M.McLaughlin, The Portable Medieval Reader Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1948, pp. 640-9.
5. Ibid., p.637.
Chapter 13:
Two Masses of Womankind
Frankish and Islamic women came from entirely dissimilar cultural backgrounds, and their individual lives varied greatly according to caste, occupation, region and
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