Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Avenzoar

AVENZOAR [ABU MERWAN ABDALMALEC IBN ZOHR], an eminent Arabian physician, who flourished about the end of the llth or beginning of the 12th century, was born at Seville, where he exercised his profession with great reputation. His ancestors had been celebrated as physi cians for several generations, and his son was afterwards held by the Arabians to be even more eminent in his pro fession than Avenzoar himself. He was contemporary with Averroes, who, according to Leo Africanus, heard his lectures and learned physic of him. This seems probable, because Averroes more than once gives Avenzoar very high and partly deserved praise, calling him admirable, glorious, the treasure of all knowledge, and the most supreme in physic from the time of Galen to his own. Avenzoar, not withstanding, is by the generality of writers reckoned an empiric ; but Dr Freind observes that this character suits him less than any other of the Arabian physicians. Aven zoar belonged, in many respects, to the Dogmatists or Rational School, rather than to the Empirics. He was a great admirer of Galen ; and in his writings he protests emphatically against quackery and the superstitious re medies of the astrologers. He shows no inconsiderable knowledge of anatomy in his remarkable description of inflammation and abscess of the mediastinum in his own person, and its diagnosis from common pleuritis as well as from abscess and dropsy of the pericardium. In cases of obstruction or of palsy of the gullet, his three modes of treatment are ingenious. He proposes to support the strength by placing the patient in a tepid bath of nutritious liquids, that might enter by cutaneous imbibition, but does not recommend this. He speaks more favourably of the introduction of food into the stomach by a silver tube ; and he strongly recommends the use of nutritive enemata. From his writings it would appear that the offices of physi cian, surgeon, and apothecary were already considered as distinct professions. He wrote a book entitled The Method of Preparing Medicines and Diet, which was translated into Hebrew in the year 1280, and thence into Latin by Para- vicius, whose version, first printed at Venice 1490, has passed through several editions.