Michael Walter Dols (1942–1989)

On 1 December 1989 Professor Michael W. Dols died in the United States after a long and difficult illness. With his passing, medical history lost one ofits foremost Arabist representatives. A native of Baltimore, Michael Dols received his BA in History from Trinity College (Hartford) in 1964 and an MA from the University of North Carolina in 1967. Drawn to the study ofthe Middle East at a time when the region was receiving increased attention in American academic circles, he went to Princeton in 1967 to begin Ph.D. work in Near Eastern Studies. There he came into contact with an active circle of scholars pursuing the social and economic history of medieval Islam (in particular A. L. Udovitch, his dissertation advisor) and concentrated on Mamluk Egypt and Syria. Taking up a suggestion from Udovitch, he wrote his dissertation on the Black Death in the Middle East and received his doctorate in 1971. This introduction to medical history was decisive, for all of Dols's subsequent research was to turn on the social history ofmedicine in medieval Islam. Perhaps the most striking features of his work were its extremely broad scope, its sensitivity to what medieval Muslims thought about and considered important, and its exploration of ways in which medical practice and medical problems fit into broader social contexts. In sharp contrast to the more traditional work of that time, Dols was but little interested in Carlylean great figures, still less in great texts, and his research often pursued important but neglected problems for which little, ifany, ofeven the most basic groundwork was in place. His dissertation, published as The Black Death in the Middle East (1977) is a striking example of this. Though ofunquestioned importance, the topic had not previously received the attention it deserved. It is not difficult to see why. The medieval Arabic plague treatises-crucial to any discussion-were (and remain) almost all unpublished, scattered throughout the Middle East and the West and often miscatalogued under such rubrics as "prayer" or "mysticism". The issues the medieval material raised were, furthermore, often ones that did not rank high on the usual agenda of modern Western scholars, e.g. prayers, incantations, and remedies involving magic squares and talismans; and even the basic comprehension of these discussions confronted the researcher with the thorny problem of an obscure and erratic technical vocabulary. The subject was indeed, as the late Richard Ettinghausen once told Dols, "a great undertaking". Dols's study was a work of fundamental importance. The fixing of the chronology and distribution of the Black Death in the Middle East marked a major advance in itself, and it was for this that the book was so well received and for which it continues to be best known. But in fact Dols devoted far greater attention to other issues: medical observations; popular and medical terminology; interpretations of the disease in terms of medicine, religion, and magic; demographic issues; urban communal behaviour during the epidemic; its impact on prices, labour, land use, and commerce; later recurrences of the plague; and the unpublished Arabic plague treatises available for study. Almost none of this had been covered in any detail in previous scholarship, and much of it had been unknown. The appearance of The Black Death in the Middle East thus marked one ofthose felicitous occasions when a profoundly obscure subject is suddenly elucidated in fine detail and the paths for future research clearly marked. Dols promoted the knowledge of numerous other topics with insightful articles on such subjects as leprosy, malaria, and insanity, and with useful translations and discussions of medieval works. Most notable among these latter is his Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Ridwtin's Treatise "On the Prevention ofBodily Ills in Egypt" (1984). Though it posed certain difficulties (largely beyond his control), this work published an important essay by an eleventh-century Egyptian physician and allowed Dols, as he once wrote to me, "to go beyond dehumanized stereotypes and recreate the world of the Muslim physician in terms of a genuine living personality . .