Ethic of Respect for Life and Health Care
As the care of the poor, so that of the sick and disabled is a frequently articulated duty. Good health, like knowledge, is a divine gift, says the Quran, which forcefully urges the sanctity of human life, equating the saving of one life to the saving of the entirety of humanity. “God has sent down a treatment for every ailment”, is an oft-quoted saying of the Prophet. People achieve happiness because of the gift of reason, of which medicine is a salient fruit, so wrote a tenth century physician al-Majusi in the introduction to his canon. Learning medicine, according to Muslim jurists, is a “duty of sufficiency”, which is incumbent upon, not every individual, but a sufficient number of people to serve the health needs of a community. Under Muslim patronage medicine made far reaching strides. Encyclopaedic treatises on medicine, particularly of Ibn Sina (Avicenna in Latin) and ar-Razi enjoyed a pre-eminent status in the medical literature of learned societies as far apart as Central Asia and Europe. Hospitals flourished as did mobile dispensaries, which were, not uncommonly, staffed by both male and female health personnel.
The science of medicine was supported by meticulous research. In the late 14th century, when the great plague, the Black Death, struck Europe and Asia, Muslim physicians rejected the widely entrenched superstition that the scourge was a divine retribution. Explaining their scientific hypothesis of contagion, Ibn al-Khatib, an eminent statesman and physician of Granada, wrote that the existence of contagion was established by experience, study of the evidence of the senses, by trustworthy reports of transmission, by the spread of it by persons, by infection of a healthy sea-port by an arrival from an infected land, by the immunity of isolated individuals. “It must be a principle that a proof taken from the tradition has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the perception of the senses”.
Ismailimail 