De Alejandría a Córdoba: la Medicina según Ibn Rushd y la tradición araboislámica

Ibn Rushd considered medicine as a productive art in his al-Kulliyyāt fī l-ṭibb, written between 1162 and 1169, and as a science in his commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s poem on the subject (Sharḥ Urjūzat Ibn Sīnā fī l-ṭibb), written in 1180. In Kulliyyāt, Ibn Rushd followed quite strictly the ideas on the status of medicine propounded by the philosopher al-Fārābī. In Sharḥ Urjūzat Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Rushd summarised the conceptions of several works including Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq’s Masā’il fīl-ṭibb, Ibn Sīnā’s Qānūn fī l-ṭibb and al-Fārābī’s works on Aristotle’s logic. The joint analysis of these sources and the evidence provided by a new manuscript of Ibn Rushd’s Sharḥ give us a clearer idea of the conception of medicine extant in this latter work and, in consequence, we can reconsider and relativise the difference between it and the conception expounded in Kulliyyāt. Ibn Rushd’s ideas on the status of medicine are analysed according to the sociopolitical context in which they were conceived, taking particular account of the fact that Sharḥ Urjūza Ibn Sīnā fī l-ṭibb was written for the intellectual and political elites of the Almohad regime.