“The people of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians] have achieved supremacy
over us in medicine.”
As jurisprudence developed, there arose a tension between those advocating the total acceptance of doctrines laid down by a particular school of law, called the principle of taqlid, and those who allowed the possibility of independent reasoning (ijtihad). Yet in none of the early writings on jurisprudence or in the collections of hadiths does there seem to be any mention of anatomy/dissection (tashrih), either approvingly or disapprovingly.
Those hadith traditions that were concerned solely with medicine, and
the appropriate procedures allowed by Islamic law, were collected by
clerics into treatises known as books on prophetic medicine (al-tibb alnabawi). Dissection, either animal or human, is not, however, mentioned in the earliest of these medico-religious tracts, the ninth-century Shiite treatise called The Medicine of the Imams, nor in the numerous
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century treatises on the subject.
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Attitudes Toward Dissection
in Medieval Islam
EMILIE SAVAGE-SMITH