The relationship between depression and dementia has been noted since antiquity and still eludes our precise understanding. Rosen (1961) notes that in the ninth century A.D. Rhazes, the Persian physician, mentions melancholy as an inevitable condition in the lives of old and decrepit persons. Later, both Robert Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy) and William Shakespeare, among others, commented on t...

Background: Iran is a land of great heritage of ancient medical scholars. Herbal medicines, as a basement of treatment of diseases have been clearly described in the medical texts of these scholars including Rhazes, Avicenna, and others. Numerous plants are introduced in these texts to treat those diseases likely to be infective ones. Few attempts have been made to evaluate ethnopharmacological...

The treatment of infectious diseases determines its history back to the research of many scientists, such as Persian scholars. The outstanding Persian scientist Avicenna (980-1037 AD) who is remembered for his contributions to the science of medicine was a master in curing many diseases like rabies. It is possible to analyze Avicenna’s opinions about rabies and his contributions to this problem...

The historical library of the Heberden Society' has recently been fortunate enough to acquire what we believe to be the earliest printed medical monograph on Gout: it was published in Germany. This treatise, dated 1534, was written by Dominicus Burgauer, a physician. The slim quarto volume, printed in Strasbourg by Mathias Apiarius, has eleven leaves. Its title: 'Ob das Podagra m6glich zui gene...

AMONG THE hoard of manuscripts that found their way at the end of the last century from the depository ("genizah") ofan ancient Cairo Synagogue to different libraries of the West, many hundreds of medical writings are to be found. The largest collection of these manuscripts, which range from tiny fragments to complete works, is preserved in the Cambridge University Library. The majority of thes...

The practice and study of medicine in Persia has a long and prolific history. The ancient Iranian medicine was combined by different medical traditions from Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and Greece for more than 4000 years and merged to form what became the nucleus and foundation of medical practice in the European countries in the 13th century. The Iranian academic centers like Jundishapur ...

Among the brilliant contributors to the sciences of medicine, pharmacy, and chemstry during the Iranian era was one genius who seems to stand for his time- the Persian, Razi, (about 865-925 AD), called Rhazes by the western world. The most important authorship of Razi is the "contines" (Alhavi) that in fact, it is a medical encyclopedia and there is the describtion of all the illnesses, the way...

here than a short notice. The change in the meaning of Biology in the early nineteenth century (W. Baron) and that of Chemistry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (H. Schimank), the concept of the gland as a secretory machine in the Borelli-circle (L. Belloni), Steno's veiled and self-contradictory criticism of Harvey around the ovum-uterus expositus-metaphor (E. Lesky) and Nature as a...

Implication for health policy makers/practice/research/medical education: This editorial emphasizes the importance of abiding by universal protocols of medical ethics when undertaking clinical research. As a researcher with several affiliations and commitments , I am often asked to assess clinical research studies , and approve student dissertation proposals prior to their initiation. One of th...

NIGHT blindness has been known since the time of -the ancient Egyptians and was described by Hippocrates in the second book of Prorrhetics. One thousand years after Hippocrates, the beneficial effects of liver on night blindness were described by the Byzantine physician Paulus Aegineta. Rhazes recognized no less than three varieties (Holcomb, 1934). Richerand described an unrecognized occupatio...