The Medicinal Use of Opium in Ninth-Century Baghdad

Extract

This is a painstaking and, to all appearances, exhaustive study of the pharmacological and medicinal use of opium, papaver somniferum, in ‘Abbasid Baghdad, and as such a worthy successor to Franz Rosenthal’s classic work on hashish in early Islam, The Herb, Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society(1971). Unlike hashish, opium was a pivotal ingredient in Islamic medicine, used as a cure-all at a time when self-medication was the norm and little else was available for a series of ailments, including pain (even today, all pain killers are made from derivatives of opium).

Part one of the book discusses the transmission of scientific, including medical, knowledge from antiquity to the Islamic world during the early ‘Abbasid period, when the newly established capital Baghdad became a flourishing centre of Muslim learning and cultural transmission between East and West. An important aspect of this was the systematic translation into Arabic of the main scientific, as opposed to literary, texts from ancient Greek, which helped preserve the legacy of antiquity for the world. Among the various luminaries whose writings were rendered into Arabic, the author pays particular attention to Pedanius Dioscorides, the most renowned Graeco-Roman physician after Galen. The work on medicine and botany of the former actually took precedence over that of the latter in Muslim circles and Dioscorides was the first to offer a detailed account of the therapeutic use of opium. His writings laid the foundation of Islamic pharmacology and were quoted and emulated by Muslim scholars until modern Western theories made definitive inroads into Middle Eastern medicine in the nineteenth century. Extracts from his materia medica are reproduced at the end of the book in the Arabic translation done by Istafan ibn Bakhtishu’ and Hunayn Ibn Ishaq (this 75-page appendix additionally contains extracts of works pertaining to opium al-Sabur, al-Tabari, Tahbit ibn Qurra, al-Razi).