Chapter 2 - From the Heavens to the Body: Ḥunayn’s Ophthalmology

Summary

The second chapter studies the efforts of the Christian Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, whose workshop in ʿAbbāsid Baghdad translated the Galenic sources considered in this book, to enhance the respectability of the specialism of ophthalmology in his Ten Treatises on the Eye. I show that, even more so than medicine, ophthalmology was at a disadvantage in its pursuit for epistemic authority because Galen himself had attacked the sub-field as an exemplar of the worrying tendency among doctors in Rome and other cities towards specialization, which threatened the unity of the discipline and the health of patients. Concerned with his own intellectual status at court, Ḥunayn, I argue, subversively uses Galen's explanation of the Timaeus' description of the eyes' service to the rational soul to give ophthalmologists a stake in medico-philosophical controversies relating to sensation. I also expose how Ḥunayn modifies Galen’s interpretation of Plato’s teleological ocular anatomy and visual theory in order to privilege the eye over all other organs as a window to cosmic knowledge.