What is enlivening is the close bond throughout the period of scientific study and public service, for these were practical men and women. They wanted not just to think things. They wanted to do things, to invent, to serve, sometimes with outlandish derring-do. Take, for example, the ninth-century poet Abbas Ibn Firnas, who climbed a building in the beloved Rusafa, the country palace and botanical garden built by Abd Rahman I. Once at the top, Firnas donned a silk suit with feathered wings and jumped off, one of the first known efforts to fly. Alas, he had forgotten to stitch on a tail, and his weight was a bit much for the lift given him by the frantic beating of his wings. The injuries he suffered, however, did not deter him. He went on to build a clepsydra—a water clock—for timing the hour of prayer. He turned one room of his house into a planetarium and perfected a method of cutting quartz. I regret to report that the poetry of this enterprising gentleman has not come to light. But one never knows what surprises the libraries of the world might yield. I live in hope.
WATER, A BOUNTY OF FOOD, ORANGE BLOSSOMS, AND ROSE OIL
Abbas Ibn Firnas was not the only venturesome inventor. Rusafa, with its early collections of plants from the Middle East, gave rise to centuries of botanical study and experiment. This work looked into the qualities of a wide variety of plant species and explored as well the nature of given regions—what we would call bioregions—in order to discern the best methods of cultivation. These studies invigorated the agriculture of Al-Andalus. And as one or another approach was tried, the results led to more experiment and understanding, in a rich and vigorous exchange of experience, observation, and analysis.
Let’s see how this worked: take, for example, a book given by the Byzantine emperor to the Andalusian caliph, Abd Rahman III, who ruled with the crucial help of his scholarly Jewish prime minister, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut. The book is the Materia Medica of Dioscorides, a first-century physician who wrote up the first great manual of medicines derived from plants. An Arabic version was already available, but the naturalists and linguists of the court wanted to reconfirm their knowledge and extend their range of language, and they promptly requested a Greek scholar from Byzantium. So arrived the monk Nicholas, who joined a group whose work was to synthesize, extend, and adapt the material to the Iberian peninsula. It is yet another instance where, by the energies and openness of the age, the doors of understanding swung wide; for from that original group of workers, and their students and collaborators, we see the vigorous development of agriculture, botany, pharmacology, and medicine.
In agriculture, what moves us is the sheer collaborative zeal over the years of the people of Al-Andalus. For a given bioregion, agronomists would plant botanical gardens in order to study the qualities and composition of the soil. They assessed the water available and pressed into action technologies adapted from Roman agriculture, combining them with ideas brought to Spain from Syria and arid North Africa. To bring new land into cultivation, they needed to distribute water more widely and efficiently. They built the great noria—large water wheels—in fast-flowing streams. The wheel was fixed with clay pots, which filled with water as the current turned the wheel; the water was then spilled by gravity into troughs, which carried it away for irrigation. Or they used the qanat, a method developed originally in Iran, which allowed for the delivery of water to cropland without any pumping. First, they would locate an upland aquifer, which was tapped by means of a horizontal tunnel through which water would flow into channels connected to cropland. In addition, a series of vertical wells were dug that ran downhill from the high end of the tunnel at the main water source. These secondary wells allowed access to the tunnel and provided air for those who cleaned and maintained it. Once in place, the qanat would deliver cool water reliably year round. It was a nice piece of civil engineering—cooperative, durable, simple, but requiring close study and careful labor.
Even today, many melodious terms still in use in modern Spanish agriculture come straight from Arabic; among them are acena or noria (water mill), acequia (irrigation ditch), zubia (small channel), almunia (farm), almazara (oil mill), azahar (orange blossom), aljibe (cistern), azud (waterwheel), and a host of others.
Such botanical study and practical engineering gave rise to the robust and diverse cultivation of Al-Andalus. The period is full of small landholders who often owned adjacent land in family groups, each of whom had its specialty and its customs. But with the use of soil science and botanical study, the understanding of crop rotation and fallowing land, the southern half of the Iberian peninsula enjoyed centuries of extraordinary fertility and diverse production. The production is so various and adventurous that reading about it makes one want to go to the kitchen and cook. Of course they grew grains, wheat and barley for bread. But they also cultivated spices and exotic aromatics—mint, cumin, licorice, marjoram, dill, caraway, saffron, garlic. There was a plentitude of fruits in production beyond our beloved pomegranate: the fig and date, lime, orange, lemon, pear, and grapefruit. And, by the recipes we have, some excellent watermelon. And I am happy to report they did not neglect the legumes, including french beans, chick peas, and lentils. As if this were not enough, near cities and in kitchen gardens they grew cucumbers, carrots, leeks, and eggplant. And of course we have already seen the heartfelt interest in ornamental plants for the family gardens, the roses and water lilies, violets and chrysanthemums.
As all this exuberant agriculture went forth, the scientists studied the initiatives, the experiments, and the techniques and tried to summarize their learning in handbooks, manuals, and compendiums. One of these is by Al-Tighnari, a poet with an interest in linguistics who, naturally enough, embarked on a series of agricultural experiments and joined forces with the agronomists and botanists who had gathered in Seville in the late eleventh century. His book, wonderfully entitled Splendor of the Garden and Recreation of the Mind, is dedicated to the governor of Granada, where recreation of the mind is carried on to this day. Another strange and splendid book is the Calendar of Córdoba, which shows us the work of the land according to the Christian calendar of months (with the Syriac and Coptic names of each). We have shared part of it with you in our look into the history of our garden. It’s a wonderful read. Not only do we have details on the times of sunrise and sunset, the constellations and even the length of twilight, we have a most delicious and persuasive description of the life on the land. Let us look into, say, April, in the tenth century:
The month when … rose water, rose oil, rose syrup and rose preserves are made; violets are picked for the making of syrup and oil; or they are pickled; syrup is made from rue-herb; there are cucumbers. The palms are artificially pollinated and the palm leaves are cut. The early grapes begin to form, the olive trees blossom, and the figs come out; the Valencian falcons hatch out their young ones; it takes thirty days for them to grow their feathers. The fawns are born. Supports are made for the lemon trees and jasmine cuttings are planted in the ground. The wild carrots are ripe and harvested for the making of jam; and then there are poppies, pomegranates, ox-tongues and the leaves and petals of the dyer’s weed from which juice is extracted. It is also the month when henna, basil, cauliflower, rice and beans are sown; the green gourds and aubergines are dug out of their forcing beds; small melons are sown, and also cucumber. Peafowl, storks and many other birds lay their eggs and begin to brood.
This is poetry, pressed into action as an agricultural manual. The description of each month is so detailed and affectionate, and so full of a sense of wonder, that one wants to take the whole text and read it aloud, month by month, to friends. It makes one want to keep bees and make wine, watch falcons and gather rose petals. It is yet another example of the practical labors of the period, where the result was a book people could love and use in their daily life on the land.
Just such enlivening engagement is seen throughout the agricultural enterprise. What impresses is the willingness to try things out, to sift through results, to carry on for years in search of the best solution. And then to sum
marize the results so that other people could use them. And so we have attempts not just to list plants, but to classify them into varieties and families, and note their preferred climate and characteristics. There were detailed descriptions of a whole set of agricultural tools, sixty in all; they even used the astrolabe to level land in preparation for planting. They used their botanical learning as well, to enrich their crops, showing for instance the most detailed knowledge of grafting, which is an art, as anyone who has tried it will know. But it is essential to master it if one is to breed hardy, consistent varieties of fruit trees. In grafting, one takes the scion wood—a cutting from the tree whose qualities you want—and joins it to existing stock. One can splice the scion in, or insert it into a cut directly in the trunk, which is called wedge grafting. This art was practiced all over Al-Andalus, deftly, and with care and cumulative refinement of technique. It’s one small bit of agricultural practice, but evocative of the devotions of the period.
It is this spirit of sustained experimentation that we find everywhere. In this way, a science could be refined, transformed, and integrated into the life of the times. Take, for instance, the coming of Dioscorides’ Material Medica, where more than one thousand kinds of medicines are discussed, most of them derived from plants. We saw how this work led to the importation of monk Nicholas, for the teaching of Greek. But the book gave rise to study of plants and herbal remedies throughout Iberia. As decades passed, more and more plants were collected and studied. Remember this line from the Calendar of Córdoba: “… juice is extracted from two different kinds of pomegranate and mixed with fennel water to make a thick ointment for the treatment and prevention of cataracts and other diseases of the eye.” Now, I have not tried this, but the description makes me want to, especially because we can go out every year into the garden together to harvest pomegranates. Be that as it may, over time the scope of herbal treatments branched out, plants were collected, medicines made, illnesses studied. By the mid-thirteenth century, one Ibn Al-Baytar put together an up-to-date list of plants for use in the healing arts: more than three thousand of them, with his comments and recommendations. And this effort was just one of the period’s devotions to pharmacology and the practice of medicine.
THE STUDY OF HEALTH, A HERITAGE OF HEALING
The art and practice of medicine was a telling part of the repertoire of many a polymath of Al-Andalus, from Hasdai Ibn Shaprut to Averroes. Such work was linked with chemistry, the kindred study of alchemy, just as astronomy was the kindred study of astrology. In the preparation of medicine, Andalusian physicians were building on the work of Persian polymath Avicenna, whose magisterial works on medicine were well-known, and the work of Al-Kindi, a ninth-century Arab genius who wrote on philosophy, mathematics, and physics, in addition to medicine. His best-known utterance is as close as we have to the spirit of Al-Andalus, at its best: “We must not hesitate to recognize truth and assimilate it, even though it may come from earlier generations or foreign peoples. For the seeker after truth there is nothing of more value than truth itself …”
Al-Kindi brought together mathematics and chemistry to produce a set of principles meant to guide the making of medicines. It was a complex business but a remarkable advance in pharmacology. It meant that in the preparation of medicine, physicians could calculate exactly the quantity of each element in a mixture, so as to give the dosage proper to the malady being treated. A Christian physician from Valencia, known as Arnald of Vilanova (who had a reputation as an alchemist and magician), translated many of these Arabic texts and combined them with Latin teachings and his own experience into a book meant to be a textbook of pharmacology. Arnald taught at the School of Medicine in Montpellier, in Barcelona and Paris, in addition to other adventures and shenanigans. He served as physician to popes and kings, and he wrote the first widely circulated book about the art and medicinal benefits of drinking wine. He seems to be the one who first proposed that before tasting wine, one should have a few pieces of bread; though, curiously, he thought such tastings should occur in the morning. He also recommended wine as a good treatment for dementia. We hope and pray it may be so.
But for originality, we must deliver the palm to Abu al-Qasim Khalaf bin Abbas Al-Zahrawi, known in Europe as Abulcasis. He was born in a village near Córdoba in 936, and so would have had access to that city at a time of such prosperity and learning that, all the way from Germany, the Benedictine nun Hroswitha, a poet and a dramatist, called the city “the ornament of the world.” Of the details of the life of Abulcasis we know little, except for the most important particular: he gave fifty years of his life to learning and practicing medicine, with the aim of gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the field, so that he might share it. And so he did, in a book called The Method of Medicine, all thirty volumes of it.
It is a remarkable presentation. He touches on his experience as a physician, discusses physiology, and demands that doctors have a sound knowledge of the whole human body, “the uses, forms, and constitutions of the parts … the bones, nerves, muscles, their numbers and origins; and also the blood vessels, body arteries, and veins, with the locations of their sources … for he who is not skilled in as much anatomy as we have mentioned is bound to fall into error that is destructive of life.” He follows all this up with clinical descriptions of various maladies, the whole gamut of them, from melancholy to apoplexy and convulsions, to arrow wounds and compound fractures, and all this along with resoundingly sane advice to question, observe, and contemplate the patient seeking care, “since many patients cannot express their troubles.”
His treatments are of striking detail. For nervous convulsions in children, as an example, the doctor has some soothing ideas: “… grease his body with milk together with sesame oil or oil of violet … give him four portions of she-ass milk daily with almond oil and sugar … the nutrition of the patient must include barley, sugar, and almond oil. Also, chopped white meat, tender and fresh, is given together with honey.” For the common cold, he recommends a concoction he made of camphor, musk, and honey. I have no idea of the efficacy of such ministrations, though the cold remedy sounds to me like a sure thing. But I have little doubt about the care and thoughtfulness of the doctor.
But the doctor is not through with his exposition. For there in Córdoba, in the tenth century, Abulcasis, in the last book of his treatise, writes the chapter that has dazzled doctors and medical historians for the last millennium. It is the first detailed treatise on surgery, and the medical zeal and the scope of procedures discussed is extraordinary. He discusses how to clean and treat a wound and cauterize it to stop bleeding and prevent the spread of infection. He would cut away dead or unhealthy tissue to promote healing (what is today called debridement) and then stitch the wound up with catgut, wool, or silk. To protect the sutures, he binds up the wound in cotton. He writes about repairing damage to bones and joints, shows us his best method to restore a dislocated shoulder or to set a broken bone in a cast. He would operate on the spinal cord. He figures out a way to dissolve bladder and kidney stones, and he describes tonsillectomy and tracheotomy, and a way to extract a rotten tooth or excise a growth from within the respiratory system with a special hook. He did eye surgery, making delicate incisions in order to repair exotic malformations called entropion and ectropion, in which one or another eyelid is turned inward or outward unnaturally, interfering with vision and causing constant irritation. And he tried to work out a way to remove cataracts.
To do all this complex and dangerous work, he used a host of surgical instruments, many of which he invented himself. In histories of medicine, one may find iconic drawings of the tools he used. Looking over a page of them, one wants, of course, to run for the hills. But in fact the illustrations mark a turning point in the history of medicine, and we can see there many familiar tools. We see surgical needles and scalpels, forceps and tooth extractors, catheters, curettes (a sharp-edged spoon for taking out a growth or other tissue from a body cavity), and retractors (to hold back the
edges of a surgical incision). Here is a small sample.
The work of Abulcasis was translated into Latin five times and spread throughout Europe, serving as an essential reference text for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There is some competition for the title of “the Father of Surgery,” but the title seems to have settled on this one busy physician of Córdoba.
One more curiosity on this, which any of us feel when looking upon the surgical tools of Abulcasis: What about the need for anesthesia? No one seems to know for sure what techniques were used, but they would have been essential to the success of these surgical interventions. There are clues which tantalize: Avicenna, whose medical texts were studied throughout Al-Andalus, used such plants as mandragora, cannabis, nightshade, henbane, and opium. All these plants have powerful and dangerous effects if the dosage is not controlled. But Abulcasis had strong and exacting pharmacological standards, to judge by his careful clinical observations. Surely he had learned from Avicenna, and from his fellow practitioners, and experimented with various mixtures, depending on the patient and the malady. And though we do not know exactly which compounds he settled on, the most common anesthesia he mentioned used inhalants from sponges, the so-called spongia somnifera, to relieve the suffering of his patient. Dried ingredients from narcotic plants were dusted over the sponge to the dosage required, and it was then moistened and held for the patient to inhale. I would certainly have been wary, but I certainly would have been willing as Abulcasis came near with his assortment of scalpels and scrapers, his probes and tissue clippers, ready to begin his incisions.
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