Review: Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine, by Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev

Abstract

Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev, Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. xiv, 290 pp., 35 color plates, 7 black and white tables, 1 black and white map. 80£. ISBN: 9780748697816. Zohar Amar is a Professor in the Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology and Director of the Unit on the History of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University, Israel who has written extensively on the identification and movement of plants in the pre-modern world, including a study attempting to identify all of the flora in the Bible. Efraim Lev is a Professor in the Department of Israel Studies and Head of The Interdisciplinary Center for the Broader Application of Genizah Research at the University of Haifa, Israel who focuses more specifically on the history of medieval materia medica. Together Amar and Lev have produced a study of the impact on medieval Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and European medicine of drugs introduced to those regions following the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. The two have collaborated in research and writing for several years, and they laid the groundwork for this study in a series of joint publications on subjects included in this volume. Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine will be an essential resource for years to come. Its descriptions of new medicinal substances traveling from East to West now provide the growing number of scholars from a variety of fields interested in the history of materia medica with introductions to the origins, movements, uses, and even physical appearances of those substances. Amar and Lev have divided their work into four chapters of unequal length. In the first chapter, which also serves as an introduction, they briefly trace the geopolitical effects of the …