%0 Journal Article
%T Urinary diseases and ethnobotany among pastoral nomads in the Middle East
%A Aref Abu-Rabia
%J Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
%D 2005
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1746-4269-1-4
%X People have been using traditional medicine including ethno-botany for several thousand years. Ancient Arabic medicine was influenced by the ancient medicinal practices of Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Persia and India. The Greco-Roman system of medicine was developed based primarily on the writings of Hippocrates (460-360 B.C.), Dioscorides (circa 54 to 68 AD) and Galen (130每201 AD). A combination of political and religious factors caused many Greek and Syriac-speaking scholars to move eastward to Persia and to establish centers of learning there. The city of Gundishapur in southwest Iran also became a center of learning, with a well-known medical school, in the sixth century AD [1,2]. One of the Arab physicians during the time of the Prophet Muhammad (571每632 AD) was al-Harith ibn Kalada (d. 634), one of the most prominent physicians of his time, who traveled to Gundishapur in Persia and studied medicine prior to the establishment of Islam. Another renowned Arab physician was Ibn Abi Rimtha. The sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad on health and illness were systemized and became known as The Medicine of the Prophet (al-Tibb al-Nabawi) [3,2]. During the Umayyad rule (from 661每750 in the East, based in Damascus), many ancient medical works began to be translated. For five centuries (750每1258) the Abbasids, based in Baghdad, dominated the socio-political life of the greater part of the Muslim world. Countless manuscripts, particularly those written in Greek, were collected and stored in Bayt al-hikmah (The House of Wisdom, established in 830, by the Caliph al-Ma'mun), where scholars worked to translate them into Arabic [4,5].Within a century, Muslim physicians and scientists were writing original contributions to medical and botanical knowledge. One of the greatest and most famous Islamic doctors was Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980每1037), author of The Canon of Medicine (Kitab al-Qanun fi al-Tibb), the epitome of Islamic medicine. This work is the culmination and masterpiec
%U http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/1/1/4