A Review of Ferdous al-Hekma fil-Tibb by Ali ibn Raban Tabari

Abstract

T Ferdous al-Hekma (Paradise of Wisdom) is one of the oldest medical texts in the Islamic world written in Arabic in 850 AD by Ali ibn Raban Tabari. He was a Persian physician who moved from Tabaristan (Mazandaran province of modern day Iran) to Samarra during the reign of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-861 AD). We studied the book of Ferdous al-Hekma fil-Tibb, in an attempt to comprehend its general outlook on diseases of different organs, their classifications and the associated signs and symptoms. The book is one of the earliest medical pandects of the period of translation, adaptation and expansion of knowledge in the Islamic world during the 9 th  century AD. Tabari was mainly influenced by Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle, as well as his contemporaries Johanna ibn Massavieh and Hunayn ibn Ishaq. The book is written in thirty chapters in a total number of 308 subtitles. In each part there is an introduction to the symptomatology, followed by organ specific diseases and therapeutic recommendations. Symptoms and physical signs of different diseases are vividly described in Ferdous al-Hekma, and some of them are even understandable for contemporary medical students.