Medieval Arabic Medical Autobiography

摘要

Posterity was not kind to Ibn Ridwan, the fifth/eleventh-century Cairene physician and self-proclaimed revisionist of the medical curriculum of his day. An example of this latter-day opinion is to be had from his earliest biographer al-Qifti (d. 646/1248) who concluded his Ta'rikh al-hukama' on something of a sour note with the following account of Ibn Ridwan