- crates and Galen, which were for the most part translated
first into Syriac, and then into Arabic. It does not come within the scope of this work to narrate or estimate the advance in medicine which may be accredited to the Arabian writers and practitioners. Medical historians do not allow that they contributed much original service to either anatomy, physiology, pathology, or surgery; but it is admitted by every student that their maintenance of scholarship through the half dozen centuries during which Europe was sunk in the most abject ignorance and superstition entitles them to the gratitude of all who have lived since. The medicine of Avicenna was perhaps much the same as that of Galen. Both were accepted by the physicians of England, France, and Germany with the slavish deference which the long burial of the critical faculties had made inevitable, and which needed the vigorous abuse of Paracelsus to quicken into activity.
Whatever may have been the case with medicine it cannot be denied that the Arabs contributed largely to the development of its ministering arts, chemistry and pharmacy. The achievements attributed to Geber in the eighth century were probably not due to any single adept. Tradition assigned the glory to him and, likely enough, if such a chemist really lived and acquired fame, other investigators who followed him for a century or two adopted the pious fraud so frequently met with in other branches of study in the early centuries of our era of attributing theories or discoveries to some venerated teacher in order to assure for them immediate acceptance. However this may be, it is not the less established that the chemistry of Geber, or of Geber and others, was in fact the fruit of Arab industry and genius.
