[Medical assimilation processes in the middle ages. From Gundishapur to Toledo]

The medicine of Ancient Greece has had an important impact on world medicine right up to modern times. One of the most interesting lines of development can be followed from about 1000 years after the death of Hippocrates (377 BC). At that time, Greek medicine and philosophy encountered the rising Islamic culture of the Arab world. It went through phases of reception and assimilation in the Middle East where, in addition to Baghdad, the city of Gundishapur is emphasized as an important centre of translation. Some hundred years later Latin Europe benefited from these Arab translations of medical and philosophical texts from Ancient Greece. After the Spanish city of Toledo had been reconquered from the Arabs, European scholars gathered there to translate the Greco-Arab manuscripts into Latin, the language of the learned in medieval Europe. The author tries to describe this course of events.