Journal of International Society for the History

Mostafa SHEHATA MEDICINE IN THE PAGAN ARAB STATE
Adopting a severe physical environment over thousands
of years, the Arabs constructed three kinds of community or
social organizations, the nomadics (bedouins) the agriculturals
and the urbans (1).
The nomads occupied the vast deserts, over which they
wander in regular patterns. The society was based on the family
and the families were organized into larger groups of clans and
tribes. They have always maintained important relations with
the villages and cities along their routes of travel. They were
animists and polytheists in religious belief. They recognized
no authority outside the patriarchal leadership of the clan
Sheikh (2).
The agricultural Arabs were those living in agricultural
villages along the rivers and natural wells.
Urban Arabs were those living in urban centers and
exercised cultural, economic and political infl uences and were
centers of fi nance, commerce and crafts (1).
The most advanced Arab communities were at the oases
of Mecaa, El Ta-if and Yathrib. Mecca was a sanctuary settled
in the fi fth century A.D. by tribemen called the Quraysh. Its
shrine, the Kaaba became a center for Arabian pilgrimage and
trade and this traditional sanctity of family ties and tribal values
were undermined by commercial and political ambitions.
Yathreb was an agricultural oasis divided by bitter feuds among
the Arabs pagans and Jewish clans of the oasis (2).
The Arab peninsula was greatly infl uenced politically and
culturally by the highly developed Byzantine and Sassanian
empires that surrounded it (2).
Military techniques, weapons, material goods and above
all the ideas of the Jewish and Christians religions were
spreading by settlements, itinerant preachers and contacts with
the converted border people (2).
Map af Ancient Arabia
Origin of Medicine
The study of the earliest origins of medical thought and
development in Arabia goes back to the most distant periods of
history (7). The history cannot be separated from the history of
ideas and struggles against superstition and charlatanism (7).
Ancient people understood medicine as the relief of pain
by their own means or with the help of others. This shows
how empirical medicine arose in primitive people, where they
got the concept of the removed of the visible cause of pain or
invisible cause of internal disease when physical removal is
impossible (7).
Searching in nature, in the action of the sun, the moon,
the sea, the thunder and lightning, for the cause and cure of
infi rmities, people learned to know the therapeutic value of
the natural forces as air, heat, light and water. This shows
how empirical medicine was often related to the magic
concept. The aid of some supernatural powers became
necessary, whether invoked directly or by means of deifi ed
animals or men expert in communicating with these superior
forces (7). It is in this atmosphere of mysticism and faith in
which the life of ancient people was evolved, at the moment
when vague superstitions were crystallized into precise
customs and religious ideas (7, 8). Amulets representing
organs of man and of animals were the materials that have
most frequently served for this purpose (7, 8).
Medical Consultation at Home
Serpents as a Spell in Magic Medicine
8 JISHIM 2007-2008, 6-7