Message #26606

[Bianca]

Like other theories, this was used to a greater or lesser degree according to the temperament of the physician. Constantinus Africanus, for instance, who lived between 1015 and 1087, was enormously important in the history of medicine mainly because of his translation and presentation of earlier medical textbooks. He had studied with Chaldeans, Arabs, Persians and Saracens as well as in Tunis (where he was born) and Baghdad. But in his Be humana natura, apart from tracing the formation of the embryo in the womb and relating this to the positions of the planets, and including a certain amount of mildly eccentric material (someone who consistently wets the bed, for instance, should eat the bladder of a river fish for eight days while the Moon waxes and wanes), he makes relatively little of astrological medicine, though there can be no doubt he studied it.
                       
It is not surprising that Constantinus studied in the East, for collaboration between Jewish and Arabian scholars had resulted in a correlation of astrological knowledge at such centres as Cairo, Baghdad, Alexandria and Kairwan in Tunis, which produced at least one remarkable scholar in Isaac ben Solomon Israeli, or Isaac Judaeus, who worked there in the 900s, and wrote books on medical astrology which survived for centuries (Robert Burton quotes from him in The Anatomy of Melancholy).

To trace the various contributions to what might be called 'Arabian' astrology is an almost impossibly complex task, for pieces of theory drifted towards the Arabian centres from as far away as China and India, as well as from Rome, Greece, Egypt and Persia. This was collected together in the great library founded in Baghdad by Harun al-Rashid and al-Mamun, caliphs of the Abbasside dynasty, and completed in about 850, where apart from the lesser works there were Greek copies of the Tetrabiblos translated for general use.

There are hints of the importance of the work done in Baghdad in the writings, six or eight hundred years later, of some Englishmen. Chaucer, for instance, wrote a Treatise on the Astrolabe in the 14th century in which he made use of Messahala's Commentary on Ptolemy, written in the early 800s; William Lilly quotes from the same source in the 1640s; Dr Dee, in Elizabethan England, owned several manuscripts of Isaac Judaeus' works.