The Medical Formulary or Aqrabadhin of Al-Kindi

patient who refused to take exercise that he could only be cured by a doctor in Aberdeen. The gullible patient rode there, failed to find the non-existent doctor-but cured himself by the exercise (pp. 53-4; cf. p. 169). Sydenham had 'an abhorring' of bleeding, and of most of the medicines prescribed in his day (pp. 41, 49). Patients were best left to 'the prince and pattern of physicians-Time' (p. 47). 'His own palate will be the best judge what is fit for him', Sydenham wrote to Locke of a patient with whom the latter was having difficulties (p. 172). When one day I asked him to advise me what books I should read to qualify me for practise, one of his juniors records, 'he replied "Read Don Quixote, it is a very good book, I read it still" ' (p. 49). With such legends accreting round him, with his radical politics and his caustic tongue, no wonder one of Sydenham's more traditional colleagues referred to him as 'a trooper turned physician', and that attempts were made 'to banish him, as guilty of medicinal heresy,' from the College of Physicians (p. 43). Dr. Dewhurst sums up: 'His pioneering of quinine was of immense benefit in fever-ridden England, and countless lives were saved by his cooling regimen in the treatment of smallpox. He exhibited iron, either in the form of steel filings or as a syrup, in the treatment of hysteria and chlorosis; and in a pain-racked age he wisely realized the value of opium, which he gave in the form of liquid laudanum'. But his reputation mainly depends on the general clinical principles which guided his own practice of medicine and illustrated his writings; his 'revival of the Hippocratic method of studying the natural history of diseases by making a series of accurate and detailed observations set the clinical pattern of future progress' (p. 59). Dr. Dewhurst's volume consists of a valuable seventy-page introduction and over one hundred pages of Sydenham's original writings, nearly all hitherto unpublished, some of them previously attributed to Locke (p. 73). It is an excellent piece of work, of interest to the general historian as well as to the medical specialist. There are several areas in the history and philosophy of man's progress to which little attention has been given. Among the least studied and understood is the Arabic culture, during the Middle Ages, especially in …