ABSTRACT
Music was not in the regular armoury of the educated physician in ancient Greece, Rome, India or China. West documents a phenomenon that has dogged the historiography of music therapy: the semblance of activity created by the recycling of anecdote. If music therapy in classical antiquity can be summed up as mainstream philosophy but marginal medicine, the medieval Arab medical world was far more generous. There have been four major traditions of literate, learned medicine in world history. These major traditions are the Greeks and Romans, the Arabs, the Indian subcontinent and the Chinese. Medieval Islamic medicine seems to have given music therapy a relative prominence in both theory and practice, in the consulting room and the hospital, which had no clear precedent, and which it was not to enjoy again until quite modern times. 'Music therapy was fringe medicine, even if one or two doctors are recorded as having made some use of it'.
