Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine

Professor Zohar Amar is Director of the Unit on the History of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is member of the editorial board of several scientific journals and author of many monographs and books. His fields of research and teaching especially include: history of the nature in ancient and pre-modern times (particularly in Jewish sources); material culture and everyday life in the Middle Ages; the history of medicine and Ethnopharmacology. Efraim Lev is Professor in the Department of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. He had a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and spent research periods as Overseas Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge. His main fields of interest and research are medieval Arabic pharmacology and medicine, and ethno-pharmacology. He won various prizes including the George Urdang Medal for pharmaco-historical writings in 2012.

‘Arabic culture provided the melting pot for the medical substances from the West and the East which became the staple ingredients of pre-modern medicine. Amar and Lev are to be congratulated for tracing the origins of natural medicaments and the routes that they followed from South East Asia and India to the Middle East, and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.’

• List of PlatesList of TablesPrefaceMap: The Origin of the Main Medieval Arabian Drugs1. Introduction2. Agricultural and Pharmaceutical Innovations: Milestones in Research and Case Studies3. ‘Arabian’ Substances4. Discussion and ConclusionsBibliographyIndexes