© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157342110X606879 Asian Medicine 6 (2010–11) 75–94 brill.nl/asme Arabic Prescriptions from the Cairo Genizah Leigh Chipman and Efraim Lev Abstract Hitherto, research on Arabic pharmacy and pharmacology has largely been based on the study of pharmacopoeias. While practical in nature, it is not clear to what extent the recipes in the pharmacopoeias were in fact used. Te Cairo Genizah, the most famous and best preserved of the many depositories of documents written by medieval Jewish communities, provides us with a unique glimpse of practical medicine, by virtue of the prescriptions found there. Tese pre- scriptions reflect the medical reality that actually existed in the eastern Mediterranean basin in the 10th–13th centuries, and will be compared especially to pharmacopoeias known to have been used, or even deriving from, members of the Genizah community, such as Minhāj al-dukkān, al-Dustūr al-bīmāristanī and the works of Maimonides. We will examine three pre- scriptions in depth, attempting to answer the following questions: Who wrote these prescrip- tions? Who made them up, i.e. prepared the medical recipes? What can be learnt from the prescriptions about medicine, public/community health, the use of materia medica? To what extent are these prescriptions original, i.e. how do they reflect the relationship between medieval medical theory and practice? Keywords prescriptions, Islamic medicine, medieval pharmacology, Cairo Genizah Pharmacology in medieval Arabic medicine Pharmacology is considered, along with ophthalmology, to be one of the medical fields in which the Arabs excelled: these are the two areas that devel- oped their own specialist monographic literature, in addition to chapters in medical compendia. 1 From quite an early stage, pharmacy and medicine were separate professions. 2 Books on medicine were among the first scientific works to be translated into Arabic during the translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries CE, 3 while the range of materia medica known to the Arabs greatly surpassed that of the classical world, due to the extent of the Islamic empires and their trade contacts with the Indian and Chinese medical 1 Savage-Smith 2000. 2 See, e.g., Hamarneh 1962, Goitein 1971, pp. 261–72. 3 Gutas 1998, p. 118. Downloaded from Brill.com03/22/2019 04:44:08AM via free access