Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon)

Moses ben Maimon, known in the Arabic-speaking world as Abu Imran Musa ibn Maymun and to Jewish tradition as Rambam, was a twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher, and physician who spent his adult life in Egypt after exile from Islamic Spain. He served as court physician to the family of Saladin while simultaneously producing the most authoritative codification of Jewish law since the Talmud. His medical writings worked within the Galenic-Arabic tradition but subjected it to careful philosophical criticism, cataloguing Galen’s contradictions while defending Galenic medicine as a whole. He wrote in Arabic, thought in Aristotelian categories, and legislated in Hebrew, embodying the cross-confessional intellectual world of the medieval Mediterranean more fully than almost any other figure of his era.

Life and Context

Maimonides was born in Cordova in 1135 (Charles H. LaWall, 1927). [GAP: Description of Cordoba’s learned status, hospitals, libraries, and cross-confessional scholarship is not supported by the cited cards.] The twelfth century produced a remarkable approximating of religious and philosophic beliefs, with Arabian speculative reasoners of the school of Averroes and leading Jewish minds entertaining the doctrines of Maimonides (Wilder, 1901). [GAP: Claim that Maimonides grew up in this convergence and that it shaped his later writing is unsupported.]

His family fled Cordoba around 1148 when the Almohad dynasty conquered the city and imposed forced conversion on Jews and Christians. After years of wandering through North Africa, Maimonides settled in Fustat (Old Cairo), where he spent the rest of his life. He became the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and, eventually, physician to al-Fadil, Saladin’s vizier, and reportedly to Saladin’s family as well (Charles H. LaWall, 1927) (Wilder, 1904). LaWall describes him as having been “made private physician to Saladin” and placed in charge of supervising the preparation of theriaca and mithridatum for the community (Charles H. LaWall, 1927).

The intellectual world Maimonides inhabited was one in which philosophy and medicine arrived together and were studied together (Temkin, 1973). Temkin observes that most of the great names in Arabic medicine were also philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition: al-Kindi, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides himself (Temkin, 1973). To be called “only a physician” and denied the title of philosopher was equivalent to being dismissed as a practitioner without genuine scientific understanding (Temkin, 1973). Maimonides was emphatically both (Temkin, 1973).

Ullmann notes that the term “Islamic medicine” is more accurate than “Arabian medicine” precisely because many of its leading figures were not ethnically Arab, and some were not Muslim: Hunayn ibn Ishaq was a Nestorian Christian, and Maimonides was a Jew (Ullmann, 1978).

Medical Works

Maimonides’s medical output was substantial, though it occupies a smaller fraction of his total literary production than his philosophical and legal writings. His most important medical text is the Medical Aphorisms (Fusul Musa, sometimes called Pirkei Moshe), a compilation in twenty-five books that draws heavily on Galen. The first twenty-four books extract and organize Galenic medical teaching; the twenty-fifth catalogues contradictions and problems Maimonides found in Galen’s own statements (Temkin, 1973).

Ullmann notes that Maimonides published individual regimina sanitatis for Saladin or Nur al-Din, placing him within a tradition of Arabic dietetic writing that was “extraordinarily abundant” (Ullmann, 1978). Walsh records that Maimonides declared it an axiom of medicine that “so long as a man is able to be active and vigorous, does not eat until he is over full, and does not suffer from constipation, he is not liable to disease” (James J. Walsh, 1920). Wilder notes that Maimonides became court physician to Saladin and died in December 1204; his medical works were overshadowed by his labors in philosophy and Hebrew theology (Wilder, 1904).

LaWall records that Maimonides also wrote a manual on toxicology and that his role at court involved the practical supervision of pharmaceutical compounding (Charles H. LaWall, 1927). The Prayer of Maimonides, a medical oath attributed to him (though its actual authorship is debated), was considered an idealistic medical creed ranked alongside the Hippocratic Oath (Charles H. LaWall, 1927).

Philosophy and Medicine

In the twenty-fifth book of the Medical Aphorisms, Maimonides catalogued doubts about Galenic statements, but he framed the exercise carefully: Galen “is the chief of this science and has to be followed in it; but his opinions ought to be followed only in medicine and in nothing else” (Temkin, 1973).

This was not a revolutionary critique. Temkin argues that Maimonides’s purpose in listing these doubts was conservative: “to help the reader who has been taught Galenic medicine, so that the knowledge he acquired does not become confused and he is not embarrassed when he encounters such a problem” (Temkin, 1973). The anticipatory resolution of problematic matters was meant to safeguard the reader’s confidence in Galenic medicine as a whole, not to undermine it (Temkin, 1973). Maimonides was performing maintenance on a system he trusted, not building an alternative to it.

Galen’s philosophical authority was consistently challenged by Arabic and Byzantine philosopher-physicians on questions of logic, physics, and metaphysics, even as his medical authority was widely accepted (Temkin, 1973). Temkin observes that from the beginning, Galen was viewed with reservation in these fields (Temkin, 1973). The theological problem was that Galen’s agnosticism and his treatment of Plato’s ideas about the soul as merely plausible threatened the foundations of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theology (Temkin, 1973). His position was ambiguous (Temkin, 1973).

This jurisdictional move had an ethical dimension as well. Goodman places Maimonides in a tradition stretching from Miskawayh through al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Ghazali, all of whom appropriated Aristotle’s virtue ethics to reinterpret the command ethics of scripture and law [good-ih03-ch03-002]. Maimonides brought this same philosophical strategy to medicine: the physician’s task was not merely to follow rules but to exercise practical wisdom in the service of health. His dietary recommendations reflect this orientation toward moderation and rational self-governance rather than reliance on elaborate pharmacological intervention.

On the specific question of nature’s healing power, Neuburger describes Avicenna as an inheritor of the Hippocratic-Galenic teaching that the true healer is the patient’s own strength, with the physician serving as an aide to natural processes rather than a substitute for them (Neuburger, 1943).

Intellectual Context: Jewish Philosophy in the Islamic World

Islamic philosophy had a profound and pervasive influence on Jewish philosophy in the medieval Islamic world: Jewish thinkers wrote in Arabic and their main philosophical authorities were Arabic authors, which is hardly surprising given the pervasiveness of Arabic culture within the Islamic Empire.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Jews could maintain their religious identity while participating fully in this cultural exchange of ideas, producing a rich corpus of Jewish science, mathematics, and philosophy written in Arabic.(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996) Jewish philosophers in the medieval Islamic world adopted not only the language and principal thinkers of Islamic philosophy but the entire philosophical agenda, including debates about the eternity of the world, the nature of God’s knowledge of particulars, and the relationship between prophecy and philosophy (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Yet medieval Jewish philosophy was not a branch of Islamic philosophy: Jewish philosophers used the same Greek sources as their Muslim counterparts but adapted them to specifically Jewish needs, just as Muslims had adapted them to Islamic ones (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Maimonides ranked all of Ibn Bajjah’s writings as first rate and followed his lead in astronomy, epistemology, and the metaphysics of the soul (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996). Towards the end of the twelfth century, as Jewish communities in the Islamic world declined and those in Christian lands grew, Arabic was forgotten among Jews and Hebrew replaced it as the language of philosophical and scientific writing, creating a new need for translation of Arabic works into Hebrew (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996).

Influence and Legacy

Maimonides wrote in Arabic for an Arabic-reading audience, but his influence flowed into three distinct streams. Within the Jewish world, his legal and philosophical works reshaped the tradition permanently; the Mishneh Torah remains authoritative, and the Guide for the Perplexed became the central text of Jewish Aristotelianism. Within Latin Christendom, the Guide influenced Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics who encountered it in Hebrew and Latin translation. Within the medical tradition, his Aphorisms and dietetic works circulated in both Arabic and Hebrew.

Siraisi notes that Jewish medical practitioners served both Jewish and Christian patients across Europe, that over 100 manuscripts of Avicenna’s Canon exist in Hebrew translation, and that in some areas of Languedoc more than a third of known practitioners between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries were Jewish (Siraisi, 1990).

LaWall argues that Arabian pharmaceutical progress was largely due to non-Muslim authorities, crediting the Caliphs’ tolerance toward teachers of other faiths (Charles H. LaWall, 1927). He writes: ‘if we take away the work of Geber, Mesue, Rhazes, and Avicenna, who were originally at least Nestorian Christians, of Albucasis and Avenzoar, who were Spaniards, and of Averroes and Maimonides, who were Jews, there is not much left with which the Arabians, or at least the Mohammedans, may be credited’ (Charles H. LaWall, 1927).

Wilder observes that in the twelfth century there existed “a remarkable approximating of religious and philosophic beliefs,” with Muslim thinkers following Averroes and Jewish thinkers following Maimonides, until orthodox reactions in both communities destroyed this convergence (Wilder, 1901). ## See Also

• Avicenna (Ibn Sina)
• Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
• Galen
• Galenism
• Islamic Golden Age
• Jewish Medicine in the Medieval Period
• Six Non-Naturals
• Translation Movement (Graeco-Arabic)

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Temkin, O. (1973). Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [Source ID: temkin-galenism-1973] — Lead authority
• Ullmann, M. (1978). Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. [Source ID: ullmann-islamicmedicine-1978]
• Neuburger, M. (1943). The Doctrine of the Healing Power of Nature. Trans. L.J. Boyd. New York. [Source ID: neuburger-healing-power-of-1943] — Superseded but valuable
• Goodman, L.E. (2003). Islamic Humanism. Oxford: Oxford UP. [Source ID: goodman-islamichumanism-2003]
• LaWall, C.H. (1927). Four Thousand Years of Pharmacy. Philadelphia: Lippincott. [Source ID: lawall-four-thousand-years-pharmacy-1927]
• Walsh, J.J. (1920). Medieval Medicine. London: A. & C. Black. [Source ID: walsh-medieval-medicine-1920]
• Wilder, A. (1901). History of Medicine. New Sharon, ME: New England Eclectic. [Source ID: wilder-historymedicine-1901]
• Wilder, A. (1904). History of Medicine. Augusta, ME. [Source ID: wilder-historymedicine-1904]
• Siraisi, N.G. (1990). Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. [Source ID: siraisi-medievalmedicine-1990]
• Pormann, P.E. & Savage-Smith, E. (2007). Medieval Islamic Medicine. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. [Source ID: pormann-medievalislamic-2007]

Editorial Notes

Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work, collected from inline markers in the body and frontmatter.

Philosophy and Medicine

(Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): Nasr & Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (1996), Ch. 21 (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch38 “It is difficult to overemphasize significance which…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): Nasr & Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (1996), Ch. 38 (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): nasr-leaman-historyislamicphilosophy-1996 ch38 “It was possible then as now for…” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): Nasr & Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (1996), Ch. 39 (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein & Leaman, Oliver (eds.), 1996): Nasr & Leaman (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy (1996), Ch. 39