June 2012 – Page 3 – purple motes

the perfect physician can revive the dead

Human nature encompasses illness and death. Universally human as well, like love, is the hope that some person or power can restore health and life. Asclepius, the ancient Greek ideal physician, reputedly healed the sick and revived the dead.[1] The Christian Gospels tell of Jesus of Nazareth curing lepers, restoring sight to the blind, giving the lame and paralyzed graceful movement, and bringing the dead back to life.[2] Physicians of various sorts throughout human history undoubtedly have treated illnesses. Subsequent to such treatments, many sick persons undoubtedly have gotten better. Compared to claiming medical efficacy in treating the sick, claiming to have revived the dead requires much more faith. Only the perfect physician can revive the dead.

In intense status competition among physicians in the ancient Islamic world, at least six physicians were associated with claims to having revived the dead. These stories of reviving the dead are formally realistic, mimetic narratives. For example, here’s the story of the physician Ibn Jumai` reviving the (apparently) dead:

One day, when Ibn Jumai` was sitting in his pharmacy near the Candle Market in Fustāt, a funeral procession passed by. After looking at it, he shouted to the kinsfolk of the dead, that their beloved was not dead and that if they interred him, they would be burying a living person. The people stood open-mouthed at this, astonished at his words, and refused to believe him. Then they said to one another: “It will not harm us to check what he says. If he is right, so much the better; and if he is wrong, nothing will have changed.” So they called to him to approach and said to him: “Prove what you have told us.” He instructed them to return home, remove the shrouds from the body and carry it into the bathroom. There he poured some hot water on it to warm it up, and treated it with aromatic substances, which had resulted in his sneezing. So the people were able to note some sign of sensation in it. When it made some slight movements, Ibn Jumai` said: “Rejoice at his return to life.” He then continued treating him until he recovered consciousness and felt well. This was the beginning of Ibn Jumai`’s fame as a practitioner and scientist. It seemed as if he had performed a miracle. Later, he was asked how he had known that the body carried on a bier and covered with shrouds still had some life in it, and he replied: “I looked at his feet and saw that they were turned upward, whereas the feet of those who are dead are stretched out flat. So I guessed that he was alive, and my guess proved correct.”[3]

Ibn Jumai` was a physician to Salāh ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Saladin), the twelfth-century Egyptian sultan. Ibn Jumai` was also a Jew. Accounts of reviving the dead are associated with physicians from non-Muslim minorities: Jews, Christians, Indians, and Sabians.[4] Stories of reviving the dead are claims to extraordinary medical skill. Describing particular physicians from non-Muslim minorities as the perfect physician may help to explain and justify their unusually high personal status.[5]

Claims about reviving the dead played into disputes over the proper time between death and burial. For more than 1500 years, Jewish law has generally required burying the dead before the subsequent nightfall.[6] By no latter than the eleventh century, some scholars in the Islamic world thought that Galen had written a treatise entitled, “On the Prohibition of Interment until Twenty-four Hours after Death.”[7] This book apparently was concerned with the burial of persons who physicians could revive. While ostensibly positioned as a claim to medical expertise (no medical figure had more authority than Galen), it probably was actually a thrust in inter-religious polemics.

Today, the Lazarus Phenomenon refers to persons whom doctors have declared dead, but who, usually less than an hour later, are recognized to be alive. No reputable doctor today would want to be associated with a literal claim to reviving the dead. That’s not out of respect for Asclepius or Jesus. Avoiding malpractice, rather than being perfect, is the more important concern for physicians today.

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Notes:

[1] Edelstein (1945), vol. 1, T. 56, T. 66-93; vol. 2, pp. 39-47. Claims that Asclepius revived the dead date back to at least as far as 600 BGC. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1019-24, states, “Even him {Asclepius} who possessed the skill to raise from the dead — did not Zeus put a stop to him as a precaution?” Wright (2003) pp. 76, 83 states:

Nobody in the pagan world of Jesus’ day and thereafter actually claimed that somebody had been truly dead and had then come to be truly, and bodily, alive once more. … The ancient world was thus divided into those who said that resurrection didn’t happen, though they might have wanted it to, and those who said they didn’t want it to happen, knowing that it couldn’t anyway.

That’s not correct. Claims that Asclepius, and probably other physicians as well, had revived the dead surely existed in the ancient world. While Endsjø (2009)’s interpretation of Paul’s beliefs is questionable, that work rightly emphasizes that ancient Greeks valued bodily physicality and hoped for restoration of bodily life after death. Most humans throughout history have probably shared that value and hope.

[2] John 11:1-44 (reviving Lazarus); Luke 7:11-17 (reviving the widow’s son at Nain); Luke 8:40–56 (reviving the daughter of Jairus); Luke Mark 5:21–43, Matthew 9:18–26, Luke 5:13 (healing leper); Luke 5:24 (healing paralytic); John 9:1-11 (curing the blind); Mark 1:40-5 (healing leper), and many other cases recounted in the Gospels. Jesus to his followers was the perfect physician.

[3] HP pp. 730-1. I have corrected a minor, obvious mistake in the translation. Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. 25 BGC to 50 GC) describes a similar incident:

rumor has spread it about that some have revived whilst being carried out to burial. … Asclepiades {Asclepiades of Prusa, a Greek physician}, when he met the funeral procession, recognized that a man who was being carried out to burial was alive

Celsus, De Medicina, II, 6.13-15. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Bk. XXVI, Ch. 8, notes of Asclepiades of Prusa:

he acquired a great professional reputation, and a no less extended fame; which was very considerably enhanced by the following incident: meeting the funeral procession of a person unknown to him, he ordered the body to be removed from the funeral pile and carried home, and was thus the means of saving his life.

Natural History, Bk. 7, Ch. 37, also refers to this story.

[4] Ibn Abi Usaibia recounts stories of the following physicians reviving persons widely thought to be dead:

Salah ibn Bahlah (Indian). HP pp. 604-7.
Ibn Jumai` (Jew). HP pp. 730-1.
al-Yabrūdī (Jacobite Christian). HP pp. 786, 789.
Thābit ibn Qurrah, as claimed by grandson, Abū al-Hasan Thābit ibn Sinān (Sabian community residing in Harrān). HP pp. 413-4.
Abū al-Hasan al-Harrānī and son Abū al-Hasan Thābit ibn Sinān, son and grandson of Thābit ibn Qurrah (Sabians who converted to Islam). HP pp. 434-6.

[5] Religious belief and medical skill interact ironically in a poem praising the physician Awhad al-Zamān:

You composed the Bursha`thā when I was suffering;
Since then I have never suffered any disorder.
If the dead had not been resurrected after the coming of Jesus,
You would have revived them with Bursha`thā!

HP p. 511. Awhad al-Zamān, who composed the Bursha`thā, was a Jewish physician who converted to Islam. He would not have believed, as Christians do, that Jesus resurrects the dead. The physician Abū al-Qāsim Hibat Allāh ibn al-Fadl authored the poem. He lived in twelfth-century Baghdad. Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah described Abū al-Qāsim as: “one of the best physicians. He was also an oculist, but poetry got the better of him. He was a witty man with a sharp tongue and wrote a book of poetry.” HP p. 508.

[6] Deut. 21:22-23 requires that a person executed by hanging be buried on the same day. The writers of the Talmud interpreted that passage to apply to all dead persons. Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin, 46 a-b, and Talmud Yerushalmi, Nazir, ch.7, 1. See Kottek (1988).

[7] HP pp. 193, 436. `Ubayd Allāh ibn Jibrā’īl ibn `Ubayd Allāh ibn Bakhtīshū` referred to that supposed Galenic text in his book “Virtues of the Physicians,” a work that he wrote in 1030-31. HP pp. 149, 197.

References:

Edelstein, Emma Jeannette Levy, and Ludwig Edelstein. 1945. Asclepius: a collection and interpretation of the testimonies. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.

Endsjø, Dag Øistein. 2009. Greek resurrection beliefs and the success of Christianity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

HP: Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, Ahmad ibn al-Qasim. English translation of History of Physicians (4 v.) Translated by Lothar Kopf. 1971. Located in: Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; MS C 294. Online transcription.

Kottek, Samuel S. 1988. “The controversy concerning early burial: a historic chapter in Halachah.” ASSIA – Jewish Medical Ethics, Vol. I, No. 1, May 1988, pp. 31-33.

Wright, N. T. 2003. The resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.

understanding technological development

About 37,000 years ago, occupants of a rock shelter at Abri Castanet in southwestern France etched the above figure into the shelter’s stone ceiling. The circular form is a furrow in the stone. The entering rod is in relief. Scientist have expressed uncertainty about what the etching represents. Such figures have been called vulvar representations. But that description is probably only half-correct.

Recently Leap Motion presented a new natural user interface. See the video below. Just imagine how this technology will be used!

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Reference: White, Randall, Romain Mensan, Raphaëlle Bourrillon, Catherine Cretin, Thomas F. G. Higham, Amy E. Clark, Matthew L. Sisk, Elise Tartar, Philippe Gardère, Paul Goldberg, Jacques Pelegrin, Hélène Valladas, Nadine Tisnérat-Laborde, Jacques de Sanoit, Dominique Chambellan, and Laurent Chiotti. 2012. “Context and dating of Aurignacian vulvar representations from Abri Castanet, France.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 2012 May 29; 109(22): 8450-5.

Wednesday's flowers

long-run economic development of the poetry industry

In late-nineteenth century England, William McGonagall made a living as a poet, even though he did not have an academic post. McGonagall performed his poetry at a local circus:

He would read his poems while the crowd was permitted to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes and stale bread. For this, he received fifteen shillings a night.

The average wages of ordinary laborers then were about thirteen shillings a week. Hence McGonagall earned a relatively high income as a poet.

Poets today confront much less attractive circumstances. A recent article analyzing the dire current conditions in the poetry industry attracted the following comment:

My Last Book

It didn’t get enough distribution to even make a remainder pile, even though some Facebook friends ordered multiple copies to share with family and my AWP friends retweeted a pretty great line. I hope the next one will sell more since I’ve already paid my 50% to publish on a press in Missouri which my LinkedIn poet friends say was an intelligent decision. After all I must show my department something before MLA when they get CVs from the new PhDs. I got a new Twitter handle, too.

Can there be any doubt that McGonagall had more enjoyable work than the work of today’s poets?

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Indian and Greek medicine competing in eighth-century Baghdad

In Caliph al-Rashīd’s court in late eighth-century Baghdad, Indian medical knowledge vied for prominence with Greek medical knowledge. The illustrious Bakhtīshū` family of physicians were leaders in Greek medicine, meaning the tradition that Hippocrates and Galen headed. The Barmakids, a family with connections to India, patronized Indian physicians and sponsored Arabic translations of Indian scholarship. Story-telling and courtly politics, rather than medical effectiveness, seems to have determined which medical tradition was more influential in the Islamic world for the next millennium.

A courtly story celebrates the superiority of Indian medicine. This story pits Saleh ibn Bahlah, an Indian physician, against Jibrā’īl ibn Bakhtīshū`, a famous and wealthy member of the Bakhtīshū` family of Greek medical scholars. According to the story, Jibrā’īl arrived late for a meal with Caliph al-Rashīd. Jibrā’īl responded to the irate Caliph by declaring that the Calph should be “weeping for his cousin, Ibrāhīm ibn Saleh, instead of cursing me.”[1] Jibrā’īl explained that he had been caring for Ibrāhīm, and he declared that Ibrāhīm would not survive past the evening prayers. Grieving intensely for his cousin, al-Rashīd ordered the meal to be ended.

Ja`far ibn Yahyā, a leading member of the Barmakids family, suggested that the calph seek the opinion of an Indian physician. Ja`far ibn Yahyā said to the caliph:

O, Emir of the Faithful, Jibrā’īl’s medicine is Roman {Greek} medicine. And Saleh ibn Bahlah the Indian in his knowledge of the ways of the Indian people in medicine is like Jibrā’īl in his knowledge of the Roman {Greek} methods. Maybe the Emir would care to summon him and send him to his cousin, so that we may learn from him what Jibrā’īl has told us.

The caliph agreed. The Indian physician Saleh ibn Bahlah went to the sick man and “examined his pulse.” That’s a prognostic mode that characterizes Greek medicine. Saleh ibn Bahlah’s deportment, however, differed sharply from Jibrā’īl’s. Saleh ibn Bahlah insisted on revealing his prognosis only to the caliph, and he addressed the caliph modestly and deferentially:

O, Emir of the Faithful, you are the Imam, the bestower of authority on rulers, whatever you decree, no judge can revoke. You and all who are present are hereby witnesses to my statement that if Ibrāhīm ibn Saleh dies tonight, or of his present malady, all that belongs to Saleh ibn Bahlah may be taken from him. Every animal may be given to the needy, all his money should be donated to the poor, and all his wives shall be thrice divorced according to the laws of Islam.

The caliph responded:

Woe unto you, you have sworn about the unknown!

Saleh ibn Bahlah replied:

No, Emir of the Faithful. The unknown is that of which no one has an inkling. I only say what is clear to me from reliable indications.

Jibrā’īl, as a leader in Greek medicine, claimed expertise in predicting the course of an illness from reading the sick person’s pulse. Saleh ibn Bahlah thus directly challenged Jibrā’īl’s medical expertise.

The competition between these medical authorities played out dramatically. The narrative makes a double-reversal:

Al-Rashīd appeared relieved by these words {Saleh ibn Bahlah’s prognosis of survival}. He began to eat and drink. When it was time for the evening prayer, a note came from Baghdad, announcing the death of Ibrāhīm ibn Saleh. Al-Rashīd turned to Ja`afar and blamed him bitterly for having recommended Saleh ibn Bahlah. He cursed India and its physicians, exclaiming: ‘Shame on me in the eyes of God that I was drinking while my cousin lay on his deathbed!’ Then he ordered a bottle of wine and water to be brought, into which he put some salt. He drank and vomited all the food and drink that was in his stomach.

Ibrāhīm ibn Saleh’s body was treated with preservatives and wrapped in a shroud. That would seems to be preparation for burial. Nonetheless, the story lights a pyre for additional drama:

No one spoke to him {Saleh ibn Bahlah} until the smell rose from the burning cinders. At that moment, Saleh shouted: ‘Allāh, Allāh, O, Emir of the Faithful, if you order me to divorce my wife and take her, give her to someone else, who does not fulfill the religious requirements, so that I can be her legal husband again. By Allāh, if you take my money away from me, while I have uttered no untruth, you will be burying your consin alive. For as Allāh is my witness, he is not dead. Allow me to go in and look at him.’ He repeated these words over and over, until he was eventually granted permission.

Saleh ibn Bahlah then engaged in medical practices not associated with Greek medicine. The courtly narrator-observer reports:

We began to hear the sound of a hand beating on a body. Then this stopped, and we heard: Allāh is great! Saleh emerged, repeating this phrase, and said: ‘O, Emir of the Faithful, come with me and I will show you a miracle.’ … Saleh took Ibrāhīm’s hand, produced a needle, and inserted it between the left thumbnail and the flesh. Then Ibrāhīm drew his hand to his body and Saleh said: ‘O, Emir of the Faithful, does a corpse feel pain?’ Al-Rashīd said: ‘No,’ and Saleh continued: ‘If you wish him to speak to you now, he will do so.’

Al-Rashīd entreated for his presumed-dead cousin to speak. But Saleh, reversing himself, objected to that action:

O Emir, I am afraid that if I treat him and he wakes up while he is dressed in a shroud, with the smell of preservative, he will die of shock, and then I will have no way of bringing him back to life. But if you order the shroud to be removed and that Ibrāhīm be taken to the washing room, cleansed and dressed in his everyday clothes, perfumed with his usual perfume, and brought back to his own bedchamber, I will treat him in your presence, and he will speak to you directly.

Ibrāhīm’s body was restored to its courtly appearance. Then Saleh re-animated it:

Saleh asked for bellows from the cupboard and started to apply them close to the sick man’s nose for twenty minutes. The body shuddered, and the patient sneezed and then sat up before al-Rashīd. Ibrāhīm kissed his hand, and al-Rashīd asked what had happened to him. Ibrāhīm told him that he had slept so soundly that he did not remember anything, but he had dreamed that a dog was attacking him and that he had defended himself with his hand. It gave his left thumb such a bite that it woke him, and he now felt pain there. He indicated the thumb which Saleh had pricked with the needle.

This story surely was crafted as dramatic courtly entertainment. But it is not mere entertainment. Competition between Indian and Greek medical authorities in al-Rashīd’s court is highly plausible historically.[2] Dramatic stories are key tools in political competition.

When the Barmakids suddenly fell from power in 803, Greek medicine gained a decisive advantage over Indian medicine. The historical facts of the Barmakids’ downfall aren’t clear. Some sensational story apparently prompted or justified that dramatic loss of courtly favor.[3] The Bakhtīshū` family of physicians, in contrast, continually served Abbisid caliphs for the next 250 years. With Bakhtīshū` physicians at its forefront, formal medical scholarship in the Islamic world built upon Greek medical thinking much more than upon Indian medical thinking. From a modern perspective, ancient medicine of both scholarly traditions had little objective merit. Greek medicine prevailed under the Abbasids at least in part through story-telling and courtly politics. The survival of a highly entertaining story celebrating the superiority of Indian medicine suggests that the story-telling competition was intense.

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Notes:

[1] HP p. 604. Subsequent quotations are from HP pp. 604-7. Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah, writing in the thirteenth century, described the story’s source thus: “Abū Hassan Yūsuf al-Haseb, known as Ibn al-Dayah, said that Ahmad ibn Rashīd al-Qatib, patron of Salam al-Abrash, related to him that his master had told him as follows….” Salam al-Abrash was a court eunuch under al-Rashīd. Al-Dayah may have been a ninth-century scholar.

[2] According to Herodotus, the Persian king Darius (Darius I, reigned 522 BGC to 486 BGC) questioned and compared Greeks and Indians about funerary rites. Herodotus, Histories 3.38.

[3] One story is that al-Rashīd erotically loved the Barmakid Ja’far ibn Yahyā, and arranged a merely formal marriage between Ja’far and al-Rashīd’s sister, ‘Abbasa. However, the couple consummated their marriage and had a child. Al-Rashīd, furious at this development, executed Ja’far and confiscated all the Barmakids’ wealth. A scholar recently observed:

In the medieval chronicles, there are as many reasons given for the caliph’s destruction of the Barmakids as there are known victims of the affair. Historians have long noted the contradictions in and occasional triviality of these reasons and have admitted that it is very hard to discern the true reason.

El-Hibri (1999) p. 18. See also pp. 45-58. That the downfall of the Barmakids was sudden is uncontested. That suggests a dramatic story at least put forward as justification for decisive action.

References:

El-Hibri, Tayeb. 1999. Reinterpreting Islamic historiography: Hārūn al-Rashīd and the narrative of the ʻAbbasid caliphate. New York: Cambridge University Press.