Graduate Student, Oriental Studies
St Cross College
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Emilie Savage-Smith
Adam Silverstein |
About
I am currently writing my doctoral thesis on mediaeval Islamic medicine focusing on the work of the Jewish court physician Ibn Jumay' who was the most important private physician to Saladin.
Ibn Jumay' wrote the first comprehensive commentary on the Canon of Medicine by Avicenna. In it, Ibn Jumay' presents a very critical evaluation of the Canon and thus provides us with a detailed picture of how a mediaeval physician would engage with what was to become one of the most important medical textbooks in history.
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I am also interested in the question of how effective mediaeval medicine was. Was it all 'bad medicine' totally inferior to modern biomedicine? Or is it rather the case that modern doctors forgot certain essential lessons that can be learned from history?
To provide answers to such questions, I consider the findings of a range of disciplines, including religious studies (faith healing), psychology (placebo effect), psychiatry (contemporary treatments of mood disorders), medical sciences (results of RCTs) and anthropology (what is healing?).
So far, I have considered the treatment of pain (migraine) and mood disorders (depression). The latter was subject to a workshop I organised in Oxford in 2010 where I brought together psychiatrists and historians to consider the meaning of madness. The proceedings are available as a podcast on iTunes U (Madness: between medieval and modern perspectives).
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My research is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
