ABSTRACT
The history of medicine involves not only the development of its own theories and practices, but also laymen’s attitudes towards it in different times and places. In this chapter, it is a sample of the attitudes of laymen that I shall examine, through adab stories – stories meant for the common reader rather than for medical experts – which claim to reflect the real-life experiences of people living in Muslim Mesopotamia, Iraq and points east in the fourth/tenth century. These stories offer a particular perspective on the representation both of the physical world and of the world of ideas. This is because the adab medical story embodies a special kind of modernity. Its subject matter is non-traditional; so, by and large, is the way in which it treats it; and it circulated among people who prided themselves on having minds that were open to non-traditional thought.
