Unani Medicine

Summary

Unani medicine (from the Arabic Yunani, meaning “Greek”) is a medical tradition that traces its theoretical foundations to Hippocrates and Galen, was systematized in the Islamic world between the ninth and eleventh centuries, and continues as a living clinical practice across South Asia and the Middle East today. It explains health and disease through the balance of four humors — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile — each linked to a temperament, a season, and a quality of heat, cold, moisture, or dryness. Rather than treating disease as a germ to be eliminated, Unani medicine begins with the patient’s individual constitution (mizaj) and aims to restore the body’s own regulating capacity through diet, environment, and pharmacy. The Canon of Medicine written by Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037 CE) remains the text most closely identified with the tradition.

Origins: Greek Medicine Enters the Islamic World

The tradition that became Unani medicine began not in Arabia but in Athens, Alexandria, and Pergamon. Hippocrates of Cos, working in the fifth century BCE, proposed that the body contains four fluids — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile — whose proportionate mixing determines health, and that disease arises when one element falls into defect or excess.(Chishti, 1988) He articulated the concept of physis — the organism as a unified whole — and located disease in the organism’s difficulty digesting its relationship with the environment, a process he called pepsis.(Chishti, 1988)

Galen of Pergamon (129–ca. 216 CE) elaborated and systematized that inheritance. He linked the four humors to the four elements (fire, air, earth, water) and their primary qualities (hot, cold, dry, moist), developed a pharmacology organized around these qualities, and introduced the concept of pneuma — a creative vital force he described as “a force pervading or inhabiting each living organism” that activates the faculties of growth, development, and nutrition.(Chishti, 1988) He also argued, for the first time, that the medicinal quality of plants is affected by the quality of the soil in which they are grown.(Chishti, 1988) Within roughly two centuries of his death, Galen was accepted as the dominant medical authority. The Alexandrian medical curriculum organized his works into a canon of sixteen treatises that became the basis for teaching across Byzantine, Syriac, and eventually Islamic medical culture.(OLeary, 2015)

Greek medicine did not travel to the Arab world in a single event. O’Leary’s analysis clarifies that the Greek culture transmitted to the Arabs was Hellenistic rather than Hellenic, already concentrated in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics and centered at Alexandria rather than classical Athens.(OLeary, 2015) The ground was prepared over centuries by Syriac-speaking Christian communities who had adopted Aristotelian logic as the universal method of investigation and who transmitted Hellenistic culture — including medicine — eastward through Mesopotamia toward Persia.(OLeary, 2015) Jundishapur (Jundi-Shapur), a city in southwestern Persia founded in the third century CE by the Sasanid king Shapur I from educated Roman captives, became a node where Greek, Syriac, Indian, and Persian medical knowledge converged.(OLeary, 2015) When Justinian closed the Athenian philosophical schools in 529 CE, several neo-Platonic scholars migrated to Persia, where the Sasanid king Khusraw I welcomed them.(OLeary, 2015)

The formal translation movement accelerated dramatically under the Abbasid caliphate. The Abbasid caliphs — not of Arab but of Persian origin — sponsored Greek-to-Arabic translation partly to forge a cosmopolitan cultural identity that went beyond the restricted heritage of Arab rule.(Pormann, 2007) The primary agent of this work was Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. ca. 873 CE), a Nestorian Christian physician who translated or supervised translations of some 129 Galenic works into Syriac and Arabic.(Pormann, 2007) Hunayn used a meaning-for-meaning approach, employed multiple Greek manuscripts, collated variant readings, and produced idiomatic Arabic rather than transliterated Greek — a deliberate advance over earlier translators.(Pormann, 2007) By the mid-ninth century, Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian medical concepts had been assimilated into Arabic medical discourse, with the Galenic humoral framework as the dominant theoretical core.(Pormann, 2007)

Ibn Khaldun’s distinction between Bedouin medicine — based on individual experience, lacking conformity with the patient’s temperament (mizaj) — and the Greek-derived learned tradition illustrates the creative tension out of which Islamic medicine emerged.(Pormann, 2007) It is worth noting what this process was not: medieval Islamic medicine was not simply a conduit for Greek ideas. Pormann and Savage-Smith are direct on this point — the tradition was “a venue for innovation and change,” not mere preservation.(Pormann, 2007) Practitioners operated across a medical pluralism that ran from learned humoral theory to local custom and religious practice; Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, and Turkish-speaking Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians all contributed to the tradition the term “Islamic medicine” covers.(Pormann, 2007)

India’s contribution deserves mention separately: the three major Sanskrit medical texts (attributed to Caraka, Suśruta, and Vāgbhaṭa) were translated into Arabic via Persian, but the four-humor Galenic framework proved dominant and Indian three-humor theory had minimal theoretical impact. The most consequential Indian contribution was pharmacological — new drugs imported through trade.(Pormann, 2007)

Avicenna and the Canon

No single figure shaped Unani medicine more decisively than Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna. Chishti identifies him as the physician through whose work Unani Tibb took its definitive form in the late tenth and early eleventh century, synthesizing the accumulated inheritance of Greek humoral medicine into a systematic teaching tradition.(Chishti, 1988) He was born in August 980 near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, at the height of the Persian Renaissance — a period of cultural and linguistic revival in which local dynasties had wrested autonomy from the weakening Abbasid Caliphate.(Gutas, 2016) His father served as a local governor under the Samanid dynasty, patrons of Central Asian intellectual life.(Gutas, 2016) The intellectual culture of the region was multilingual: medical terminology already combined Arabic, Greek, Syriac, and Persian elements, reflecting centuries of contact between Christian Syriac physicians trained in Baghdad and the Persian-origin drug names carried from Jundishapur.(Gutas, 2016)

Avicenna began writing the Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) in the city of Gurgan and continued drafting it alongside his philosophical encyclopedia, the Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing), during a period when he served as vizier at Hamadhan — working by night because daytime attendance on the prince left no other time.(Gutas, 2016) He died at Hamadhan in June or July 1037 at age fifty-eight, reportedly remarking near the end that “the manager who used to manage me is incapable of managing me any longer.”(Gutas, 2016) The Canon — described by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the single most famous book in the history of medicine, in East or West” — drew together all available medical knowledge and codified it into five long volumes totaling approximately one million words.(Chishti, 1988)

The Canon organized earlier Galenic and Hippocratic content into a format that could be taught, indexed, and applied. Its durability as a teaching text owes something to what Gutas identifies as Avicenna’s distinctive intellectual habit: a passion for classification and subdivision that exceeded any Greek predecessor and was copied in turn by medieval European philosophers.(Gutas, 2016) Avicenna was not simply translating Galen into Arabic; he was reorganizing the material into a systematic architecture. The tradition that descended from the Canon is what is properly called Unani medicine in South Asia.

Core Theory: Elements, Temperament, and the Seven Naturals

Unani medicine organizes its theoretical knowledge into three domains: the theory of naturals (establishing norms for the healthy body), the theory of causes (explaining deviations from those norms), and the theory of signs (identifying diagnostic features of imbalance).(Chishti, 1988) Each domain rests on the concept of mizaj — temperament — which is both the body’s characteristic constitutional mixture and the standard against which all deviations are measured.

Pormann and Savage-Smith identify humoral pathology as the single most pervasive explanatory principle in medieval Islamic medicine: four humors, each linked to two primary qualities, one season, and one temperament (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic).(Pormann, 2007)

The four elements and their humors. The tradition holds that all matter is composed of four elements: fire (hot and dry), air (hot and moist), water (cold and moist), and earth (cold and dry). These map onto four bodily humors produced in the liver: blood (corresponds to air), phlegm (water), yellow bile (fire), and black bile (earth).(Chishti, 1988) Each humor arises from a stage in the digestion of food: blood from the finest nutrients, phlegm from the second level, yellow bile from the third, and black bile from the least digestible fractions.(Chishti, 1988) Avicenna distinguished these four primary humors from secondary humors — the intracellular and extracellular fluids of the tissues — and identified black bile as the worst abnormal humor, a toxin implicated in cancerous growth.(Chishti, 1988)

The seven naturals (arkan). Tibb theory classifies seven components as the “naturals” — the constitutive norms of a healthy body: elements, temperaments, humors, organs, forces, actions, and spirits.(Chishti, 1988) These seven categories provide the framework within which all diagnosis and treatment is organized. They are the standards from which disease states are identified as deviations.

Temperament (mizaj). There are nine possible temperaments: one equable (balanced, healthy) and eight nonequable. The four simple nonequable temperaments are dominated by a single quality: hot, cold, wet, or dry. The four compound nonequable temperaments combine pairs: hot and dry, hot and wet, cold and dry, cold and wet.(Chishti, 1988) Diagnoses of imbalance are made against sixteen possible intemperaments — four simple and four compound, each either qualitative (a shift in the body’s qualities without excess material) or material (an excess of the humor itself), yielding sixteen distinct patterns of deviation.(Chishti, 1988)

Primary organs and faculties. Four organs hold primary importance: the brain (seat of psychic forces and mental faculties), the heart (source of vital power and innate heat), the liver (seat of nutritive faculties), and the reproductive organs (determining sex and constitutional temperament).(Chishti, 1988) Each primary organ governs one of three faculties: the psychic (nafsaniat) arises in the brain, the vital (haywaniat) in the heart, and the natural (taby’yat) in the liver.(Chishti, 1988) Avicenna located the activation of all three faculties in the divine permission (idhn) — the cosmic force that “first alights in the heart” through the indrawn breath and makes life possible.(Chishti, 1988)

Each humor also produces a characteristic personality type when dominant: blood humor produces a sanguine (optimistic) constitution; phlegm produces a phlegmatic (apathetic) one; yellow bile produces a bilious (quick to anger) constitution; and black bile produces an atrabilious (melancholy) one.(Chishti, 1988)

The Six Essentials (Asbab-e-Sitta Zarooriya)

The practical center of Unani preventive medicine is its doctrine of six primary factors governing health. These are the Unani equivalent of the Galenic six non-naturals, codified within the Tibb framework as the asbab-e-sitta zarooriya (the six essential causes). Pormann and Savage-Smith identify the same framework in medieval Islamic medical texts as a central principle: “Health could often be regained by adjustment of the ‘six non-naturals’ — factors external to the body over which a person could have some control.”(Pormann, 2007)

The six factors are:(Chishti, 1988)

1. Air quality — the environmental air breathed, including climate, season, and geographic location
2. Food and beverages — both the qualities and quantities of what is ingested
3. Movement and rest — physical activity and its absence
4. Sleep and wakefulness — the balance and timing of rest
5. Eating and evacuation — intake, digestion, and elimination (including retention of waste)
6. Emotions (nafs) — mental and affective states, from anger and fear to joy and grief

Disturbance of any of the six in quantity, quality, timing, or sequence can produce humoral imbalance and eventually disease.(Chishti, 1988) This framework places patient behavior and environment at the center of medicine; the practitioner’s first task is to understand the patient’s habitual relationship to these six variables before turning to pharmacy. The air and climate factor is understood in relation to constitutional ancestry: Tibb holds that persons whose lineage is in very hot environments cannot adjust within a few generations to great climatic change, and that relocation to a very cold environment may leave the vital force unable to generate sufficient heat, producing sadness, depression, and melancholy.(Chishti, 1988)

The emotional category is particularly elaborated. Unani medicine understands the changing states of mind as part of what it calls nafs — the Arabic term for the ego-soul and its appetites.(Chishti, 1988) Mood is legible through the breath: anger is marked by sudden, forced exhalation; fear by sudden, forced inhalation; joy by gentle exhalation; and depression or gloom by gentle inhalation.(Chishti, 1988) Severe anger, for example, is understood as the result of excess moisture in the heart humor and is treated through diet rather than as a purely psychological event.(Chishti, 1988) Mental conditions are held to be the result of humoral disturbance, not its cause: a person muddled in mental processes may appear to have an intellectual deficiency, but phlegm humor imbalance accounts for the sluggishness and is treated by resolving the excess phlegm.(Chishti, 1988)

Diagnosis

The defining diagnostic inquiry in Unani medicine is determining the patient’s mizaj — individual temperament — because all therapeutic decisions follow from it. The practitioner reads the temperament through several channels.

The pulse (nafas). The word nafas in Tibb simultaneously means breath, pulse, soul, and ego — a terminological unity that reflects the tradition’s view of these as aspects of a single vital process.(Chishti, 1988) Avicenna incorporated elements of Chinese pulse analysis into Tibb’s pulse system. The Unani practitioner evaluates the pulse against ten guides: quality of expansion, quality of impact, duration of cycle, duration of pause, emptiness or fullness, compressibility of the artery, moisture content, regularity, order and disorder, and rhythm.(Chishti, 1988) Within the first quality alone — expansion — twenty-seven variations are recognized.(Chishti, 1988) Pulse diagnosis alongside uroscopy (examination of urine) formed the two foundational diagnostic tools across medieval Islamic medicine more broadly.(Pormann, 2007)

Urine examination (qararah). Urine color, consistency, sediment, and odor reveal the state of the liver, kidneys, and the humor currently dominant.

Observation of constitution. Skin complexion serves as a direct index of humoral dominance: a rose color between white and red indicates balance; yellow indicates yellow bile; black indicates black bile; red indicates blood humor; and white or fair indicates phlegm.(Chishti, 1988) Life stage also determines the expected temperament: youth is hot and humid; adulthood hot and dry; maturity cold and dry; old age cold and dry in the principal organs, with accumulated cold and moist surface moisture.(Chishti, 1988)

The three body states. Tibb recognizes three possible states: health (equable temperament), disease (departure from equable), and a neutral intermediate state in which the signs of disease are not fully manifest. The neutral state takes three forms: health and disease coexisting in different parts of the same body; neither health nor disease existing perfectly (as in the elderly or convalescing); or the body alternating between states according to season.(Chishti, 1988)

Signs of health. Equable temperament in Tibb is defined positively: a balanced complexion, good digestion, pleasant dreams, strong imagination, clear intellect, reliable memory, and emotions held midway between the extremes of anger and joy, courage and fear.(Chishti, 1988)

Therapeutics

Tibb therapeutics follows an explicit hierarchy: regimental measures first, pharmacological intervention second, surgical correction last.

Regimen (ilaj bit-tadbir). The first therapeutic resort is always adjustment of the six essentials — modifying diet, correcting sleep and movement, changing the patient’s climate or environment. Avicenna’s dietetics understood food as classified by degrees of hot or cold quality: first-degree foods affect metabolism imperceptibly; second-degree foods nourish without overwhelming the body; third-degree substances are medicinals that act on the body without being overcome by it; fourth-degree substances are poisons that cease metabolic function.(Chishti, 1988) Foods receive a hot-cold classification based on whether they leave an ash residue in tissues after oxidation — cold foods leaving more ash, hot foods less — and this determines whether they accelerate or slow metabolism.(Chishti, 1988) Digestion itself is understood as a process of “cooking” by bodily heat: the stomach converts food to chyme, which reaches the liver where the finest fractions are made into blood and the four humors distributed.(Chishti, 1988)

Pharmacy (ilaj bil-dawa). Unani materia medica is organized by the same degree system applied to foods: each drug is classified by its primary quality-pair (hot/cold and dry/moist) and by the intensity of its effect (first through fourth degree).(Pormann, 2007) Stapley’s account of the Canon’s pharmacology notes that 797 drugs appear in its first book and that Avicenna organized them according to this four-degree system: first-degree drugs produce an effect barely perceptible unless taken repeatedly; second-degree drugs are slightly more potent; third-degree drugs act directly on normal functioning; and fourth-degree drugs can cause real damage or death.(Stapley, 2024) The Canon’s symptomatology is similarly precise: Avicenna distinguishes fourteen types of pain — including boring, compressing, heavy, tearing, pricking, incisive, and irritant — and classifies analgesic agents into resolvents (removing the underlying cause), narcotics (inducing sleep), and analgesics producing cold that dulls sensation.(Stapley, 2024) Drugs are predominantly of vegetable origin, and their benefit is assessed by the effect produced on the whole person across physical, mental, and moral planes.(Chishti, 1988) Islamic physicians significantly expanded the Greek pharmacopoeia, introducing camphor, musk, senna, myrobalan, and sal ammoniac, and developing distillation techniques for essential oils and inorganic acids.(Pormann, 2007) Avicenna himself invented the distillation of floral oils and was the first to distill essence of rose; he also laid the groundwork for filtration, sublimation, and calcination.(Chishti, 1988)

The Canon’s contraindications for venesection illustrate the tradition’s attention to constitutional vulnerability: Avicenna specified that bloodletting should not be performed on patients under fourteen years of age or during pregnancy, that it was contraindicated in patients with weak heart, brain, liver, or sensory organs, and that when the physician did not understand the presenting disease he was counseled to withhold treatment entirely and leave the situation to nature.(Stapley, 2024)

Al-Razi (d. 925 CE), the physician and philosopher who practiced in Baghdad and Ray, extended pharmacy into the domain of moral philosophy with his treatise On Spiritual Medicine, which argued that the pursuit of knowledge and the avoidance of mental afflictions — greed, lust, fear, regret — was both a philosophical imperative and a path to bodily health, explicitly linking moral practice to clinical outcome.(Pormann, 2007)

Temperament-correcting prescriptions. The practitioner’s task is to select drugs whose qualities oppose the identified intemperament: a hot intemperament (fever, thirst, rapid pulse) is treated with cold-quality drugs; a cold intemperament (weak digestion, phlegmatic conditions) with hot; a moist intemperament (puffiness, excess sleep) with dry; a dry intemperament (insomnia, wasting, rough skin) with moist.(Chishti, 1988)

Disease as obstruction. Disease in Tibb arises from obstruction — an excess (plethora) either in the quantity or quality of a humor.(Chishti, 1988) Quantity excess creates pressure and risk of rupture; quality excess creates chronic and degenerative disease. The Tibb practitioner admits the existence of biochemical and pathological events while holding that a true cure requires treating the underlying humoral imbalance rather than suppressing its surface manifestations.(Chishti, 1988) The tradition explicitly does not adopt germ theory as a primary causal explanation: while acknowledging the existence of microbes, it argues that microbial overgrowth is itself the result of a prior temperament disturbance that provided the altered environment in which pathogens can thrive.(Chishti, 1988)

Key Figures

Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 460–377 BCE) is the tradition’s founding authority, credited with establishing humoral theory and the concept of the organism as a unified whole responding to its environment.(Chishti, 1988)

Galen of Pergamon (129–ca. 216 CE) systematized humoral medicine into a unified framework: linking elements to humors, introducing the three-spirit physiology, organizing pharmacology by degrees, and establishing himself, as Pormann and Savage-Smith note, as “the model physician whose doctrine was to dominate the medical discourse, not only in Europe but also in the Islamic world, for at least the next millennium and a half” — a tradition Temkin’s student Oswei Temkin called “Galenism.”(Pormann, 2007)

Hunayn ibn Ishaq (808/809–873 CE), a Nestorian Christian from Hira, was the primary architect of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement, translating or supervising 129 Galenic works and introducing the collation and meaning-for-meaning translation methods that produced idiomatic Arabic medical texts from fragmentary Greek originals.(Pormann, 2007)

Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (ca. 854–925 CE) was among the most clinically acute physicians in the Arabic tradition. He described smallpox and measles as distinct diseases for the first time in Arabic literature, and wrote On Spiritual Medicine, which argued for a medicine of the soul alongside medicine of the body.(Pormann, 2007)

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980–1037 CE) was born near Bukhara, rose to practice medicine and serve as a court physician and vizier despite spending much of his adult life in flight or in political difficulty related to his family’s Isma’ili religious associations.(Gutas, 2016) The Canon of Medicine synthesized all available medical knowledge and organized it through Avicenna’s characteristic passion for classification and subdivision.(Gutas, 2016) It was the text that most shaped the Unani tradition as a teaching system.

Relationship to Other Traditions

Unani and Galenic medicine. Unani medicine is Arabic Galenism — the same humoral framework, adapted to a monotheistic audience and extended through new pharmacological knowledge and clinical observation. The translators actively modified texts for their context: Hunayn rendered “the gods created man” as “God — great and exalted is He — when he created man,” adapting the philosophical content to Islamic theological commitments.(Pormann, 2007) What Unani medicine added beyond Galen includes an expanded materia medica, more systematic classification of intemperaments, and integration of the six essentials as a formal preventive doctrine.

Unani and Ayurveda. The two traditions share the concept of a constitutionally variable patient who requires individualized treatment, and both use qualitative pharmacological classification systems. They diverge in their theoretical frameworks: Ayurveda organizes the body around three doshas (vata, pitta, kapha) while Unani uses four humors aligned with four elements. Indian medical texts were translated into Arabic by the ninth century, but the four-humor Galenic framework proved dominant; India’s theoretical influence on Unani was minimal, while its pharmacological contribution — new drugs from the subcontinent — was substantial.(Pormann, 2007)

Unani and medieval European medicine. Medieval European university medicine was also built on Arabic Galenism, received largely through Latin translations of Avicenna’s Canon and the Arabic-authored Isagoge of Hunayn ibn Ishaq. Pormann and Savage-Smith describe this debt as decisive: “The history of medieval Islamic medicine is in essence the history of the origins of early modern Western medicine.”(Pormann, 2007) The two traditions parted ways when European medicine began dismantling the Galenic framework in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through anatomical dissection, Harvey’s demonstration of blood circulation, and the mechanization of physiology. Unani medicine did not undergo this disruption and continued as a living tradition.

Transmission to the Indian Subcontinent

The transmission of Greco-Arab medicine to the Indian subcontinent followed the spread of Islamic rule into South Asia. Saad and Said trace the formal introduction of Unani medicine to India to the period of the Delhi Sultanate (13th century), when Muslim physicians from Persia and Central Asia arrived at the courts of the Sultans and established medical practice that drew on the Canon and related texts.(Saad Said, 2011) The word “Unani” itself is the Arabic form of “Ionian” or “Greek” — a name adopted in the subcontinent to mark this tradition’s Hellenic ancestry, distinguishing it from native Ayurvedic practice while simultaneously claiming the prestige of classical antiquity.(Saad Said, 2011) Rather than displacing Ayurvedic medicine, Unani practice absorbed elements from it: certain Indian drugs and diagnostic practices entered the Unani pharmacopoeia, and some Ayurvedic constitutional concepts were assimilated into Unani interpretations of temperament — a process of medical syncretism that continued for centuries.(Saad Said, 2011)

The tradition maintained the core humoral system inherited from the Arabic translation of Galen: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, each associated with a temperament and a primary quality, producing the same grid of nine temperaments (one equable, eight unequable) that organized diagnosis and treatment in the Persian and Arabic tradition.(Saad Said, 2011) Today Unani medicine is practiced in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and parts of the Middle East, with an estimated forty-five thousand licensed practitioners in Pakistan alone and degree-granting institutions in several South Asian countries.(Saad Said, 2011)

Modern Practice

Unani medicine continues as a recognized and regulated system of medicine in South Asia, primarily India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. In India, practitioners are licensed by the government under the category of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy). Colleges offer degree programs in Unani medicine, and the system maintains its own formularies and pharmacopoeias. Smaller practice communities exist in parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, and wherever South Asian diaspora communities have settled.

The tradition maintains its own hospital system, formularies, and regulatory structures. It continues to practice pulse and urine diagnosis, to classify patients by temperament (mizaj), and to organize treatment around the six essentials and a degree-based pharmacology. The Canon of Medicine remains a reference text in Unani medical colleges, though it has been supplemented by centuries of clinical commentary and expanded drug knowledge.

Human Notes

See Also

• galenic-medicine
• humoral-theory
• six-non-naturals
• four-elements
• translation-movement
• pneuma
• ayurvedic-medicine
• pulse-diagnosis
• dietetics
• avicenna (person page)
• ibn-sina (person page)
• galen (person page)
• hippocrates (person page)
• hunayn-ibn-ishaq (person page)
• al-razi (person page)

Sources

Primary lead source: Chishti, Hakim G.M. The Traditional Healer’s Handbook. Inner Traditions, 1988. Supporting academic sources: Pormann, Peter E., and Emilie Savage-Smith. Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. O’Leary, De Lacy. How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs. Routledge, 2015 [orig. 1948]. Gutas, Dimitri. Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. 2nd ed. Brill, 2016.