ABSTRACT
The intention of this brief chapter is to sketch the theoretical bases for music therapy in the Middle Ages and to explore to what extent this theory was put into practice in Islamic and Christian societies. Most medical theory and practice in medieval Western medicine derives from Arabic medicine, and it is interesting to see in the case of music therapy whether the Arabs contributed anything to Western medicine, and, if not, why not. It found a medical context in the largely lost Greek work of Rufus of Ephesus on curing melancholy, which was known to Arabic and Jewish doctors. The Arabs had their own term for this genre: spiritual medicine, and several texts were devoted to this subject. Perhaps of more relevance is the fact that special care for the mentally ill developed in the Islamic world in a much more organized fashion and at a much earlier date than in the medieval West.
