Isaac Israeli and his Book of Urine

Isaac Israeli (c850-950), philosopher and physician was born in Egypt where he practised as an oculist before moving to Kairouan, in Tunisia, where he served as physician to the Caliph Ziyadat Allah and later to 'Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi. His best known medical work Book of Fevers (Kitab al-Hummayat) was widely used as a medical text until the seventeenth century. This paper reviews Israeli's medical career through his Book of Urine (Kitab al-bawl), based on a fifteenth century Hebrew manuscript Sefer Hasheten (MS Hunter 477) in the Hunterian Collection of the University of Glasgow. This manuscript, most likely a translation from the original Arabic, describes the formation of urine and the value of visual examination of urine for the diagnosis and prognosis of disease. Israeli emerges as an outstanding physician and scholar who made a lasting contribution to Arab-Jewish medicine in its most productive period.