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ANATOMY AS TACKLED BY LANGUAGE AND MEDICINE
Dr. Mohammed Salhiyah
KUWAIT

ABSTRACT

Few researchers tried to probe the relation between linguistic books dealing with medical diction and those other books dealing with the same subject from a purely medical point of view. The Arabic language is almost unique in that a lot of linguistic works in Arabic were also of great use to medical students. This paper focuses on the following points:

  • A contrastive study between linguistic books, especially those entitled, "The Creation of Man", and their contemporary medical works. The conclusion was that the linguists' knowledge about anatomy was quite advanced. Moreover, they knew about the anatomy of certain internal organs of the body long before doctors did.
  • The paper makes reference to the efforts made by doctors who got interested in anatomy. These references, albeit traditional, serve to reveal more how these doctors tried to fill in the gaps in acquiring their anatomical information.
  • On the other hand, the paper points out the distinguished contributions of certain physicians to the field of anatomy, especially Ibn al-Nafees's dissertation on the uses of the human organs, and that of the scholar, Ahmed Abdul Moneim al-Damanhouri, entitled, "Al Qoul Al Sareeh Fi Elm Al- Tasreeh" (A Clear word on Anatomy). The best and most important of these dissertations is the one kept in the American Medical Library under No. 76A. It is an outstanding work with an excellent anatomical study of the internal organs of the human body. It contains whole chapters on the anatomy of the skeleton, the nerve system and even the muscles.

CONCLUSIONS:

  • A student of the history of anatomy will have to make frequent references to linguistic books in his study.
  • The unpublished Islamic medical heritage contains a lot of indications to the extent of Muslim Arabs' achievement in this field.
  • As the English translation of the full text could not be made available, we are publishing here the abstract only.

Editors.