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Who was al-Ruhawi, and what does his Adab al-Tabib actually say about the physician?

Omar Ragab Fellow
· 4 replies
BioethicsGreek & RomanIslamicJewish#adab-al-tabib#islamic-medicine#medical-ethics-history#physician-character
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Its coordinates: 3.3.1 Bioethics and Medical Ethics

At a hospital conference in Cairo, a speaker mentioned al-Ruhawi's Adab al-Tabib as one of the earliest systematic works on medical ethics, written in the ninth century, and then moved straight on to modern guidelines.

I've been unable to find much more about it. I'd like to know who he was, roughly what the book covers, how it relates to the Greek tradition (Hippocrates and Galen), and whether any of it has something to say to doctors now. I'd also be glad to hear about where it survives, and whether there's a translation I can read.

I'm especially curious because the speaker treated it as an "Islamic" work, but I've read that the medical profession in that period included many Christian and Jewish physicians. How should we describe it?

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  1. Layla Sfeir

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Isḥāq ibn ʿAlī al-Ruhāwī was a physician whose name points to al-Ruhā, the city of Edessa in upper Mesopotamia. We know little about his life, and scholars still discuss his religious background, which is a good illustration of your last point. Adab al-ṭabīb is usually rendered "Practical Ethics of the Physician" or "The Conduct of the Physician". As far as I know it survives in a single manuscript, held in Turkey, and there's an English translation by Martin Levey from the 1960s.

    It covers a great deal: the physician's beliefs and character, care of his own body and soul, conduct with patients, visitors and attendants, what patients owe the physician, the dignity of the profession, and how physicians should be examined and their competence tested. He is often credited with recommending that physicians record the course of their cases so that their treatment can be reviewed by others, and that idea is frequently cited as an ancestor of peer review.

    He draws constantly on Hippocrates and especially Galen, within a framework of belief in one God. So I'd describe it as a work of the Arabic medical tradition, shaped by Greek medicine and written in an Islamic-era society, rather than a work of "Islamic ethics" narrowly.

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Other answers

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    The Galen connection is worth following up. Galen wrote a short treatise arguing that the best physician is also a philosopher: he must know logic, nature and ethics, and must despise money. Al-Ruhāwī's emphasis on the physician's own character fits that. The Hippocratic Oath, by contrast, is mostly about duties: to the teacher, to patients, and things the physician will not do. Al-Ruhāwī seems to have tried to combine both: a code of duties and a portrait of the kind of person who can keep it.

  2. Mona Fathy

    Fellow

    From a cataloguer: a work surviving in one manuscript is a work that very nearly didn't survive. It's worth asking how many similar treatises are lost, and how much our picture of "the earliest systematic medical ethics" depends on that luck. Whenever a speaker says "the first", I mentally add "that we have".

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  3. Omar Ragab

    Fellow

    Layla, and Mona for that sobering point: I'll look for Levey's translation. One thing I learned while searching: the "Physician's Prayer" framed in many clinics under Maimonides' name is generally thought to be an eighteenth-century composition. Maimonides was a real physician who wrote real medical works, but that particular text isn't his. It seems medical ethics has been borrowing famous names for a long time.

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