The origins of dietetics understood as "the systematic control of food and drink in order to conserve health or combat disease"1 may be traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus, written chiefly between 430 and 330 BC. In Tradition in medicine the author argues that in the beginning man must have eaten the same food as the animals, that is, the produce of the earth, fruits, vegetables and grass. Th...

Little is known about the state of experimentation in the field of medicine during the Medieval Islamic era. With few exceptions, most of the contemporary sources on history of medicine propagate the idea that the roots of experimental medicine in its modern form, including clinical trials and drug-potency studies, first started during the European Renaissance in the 16(th) to the 18(th) centur...

Knowledge of medieval Islamic medical practice has traditionally been based on the analysis of learned treatises. However, a comparison of the therapeutic advice advocated in formal treatises with treatments prescribed to patients has shown that the appeal to theory was to a large extent neglected in practice and, therefore, that theoretical works are not a reliable account of reality. From thi...

discussion while this novel type of drug delivery is known as a suitable substitute for oral and parenteral administration, it was well accepted and extensively mentioned in persian medical and pharmaceutical manuscripts and other traditional systems of medicine as well. accordingly, medieval pharmaceutical standpoints on nasal dosage forms could still be an interesting subject of study. theref...

6th century BCE, probably as part of the expansion into the region of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Lying on one of the main branches of the ancient Silk Roads, which connected Europe and Africa to the Far East, a succession of cities flourished. By the early medieval period these encompassed over 1,000ha (Fig. 1). The great Islamic city of Sultan Kala, capital of the eastern Islamic world, wa...

BACKGROUND Sweet melons, Cucumis melo, are a widely grown and highly prized crop. While melons were familiar in antiquity, they were grown mostly for use of the young fruits, which are similar in appearance and taste to cucumbers, C. sativus. The time and place of emergence of sweet melons is obscure, but they are generally thought to have reached Europe from the east near the end of the 15th c...

abū l-ḥasan alī ibn al-‘abbās al-majūsī ahvazi (? 930-994 ad), best known as haly abbas in the west, was a 10th century persian physician whose lifetime coincided with the flourishing of medical science in the near east, the islamic medicine golden age, an era extending from the 9th to the 12th centuries ad. haly abbas, in his extant book kāmil al-sinā‘ah al-tibbīyah (the perfect book of the ar...