Prof. Efraim Lev
About
elev@univ.haifa.ac.il
Efraim Lev is a Full Professor at the University of Haifa, where he has served as Dean of Humanities.
Trained as both a historian and a field biologist, his interdisciplinary research focuses on the history of medicine and pharmacology within medieval Muslim lands.
He has held prestigious visiting scholar positions at the Wellcome Institute in London and St. John’s College, Cambridge.
With a bibliography including 9 books and nearly 100 refereed articles, Lev is a central figure in reconstructing ancient medicinal practices and the cross-cultural transmission of pharmacological knowledge in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Lecture Abstract:
For more than one thousand years Arab medicine held sway in the ancient world, from the shores of Spain in the West to China and India. This paper addresses one aspect of medieval medicine - the relative significance of the Greek in comparison with the Indian medical heritage on the evolution of Arab medicine and pharmacology. This issue is investigated in our work from the angle of materia medica, which, we maintain, is ultimately a reliable indication of the "specific weight" contributed by either of these medical legacies. Most of these “new” medicinal substances from South East Asia (India, China and the Indian Ocean Islands) were brought by the Arabs to the Mediterranean and Western Europe through the Middle East via various trading routes. Not all of them were new in the domain of the Islamic empire. Some of them were already in use in Mesopotamia in the pre-Islamic period But their distribution has expanded by the Arabs. Jewish merchants played an important role in distributing medicines from India, as evidenced by the Cairo Genizah documents. Our research aims to assess the significance and the extent of the phenomena of the distribution of the new drugs and spices. It deals mainly with the following issues: reconstruction of a complete a list as possible of all the ‘new’ medicinal substances that were distributed by the Arabs (about one hundred); study the contribution and influence of these substances on the theoretical and practical medieval medical legacy, and understand how, and to what extent, these substances merge with the strong medieval demands and fashions regarding spices, drugs, perfumes, ornaments, foodstuffs, etc.