Friday, March 20, 2015

A00414 - Ibn al-Wafid, "The Book of Simple Drugs" Author

Ibn al-Wafid
Ibn al-Wafid (Ali Ibn al-Husain Ibn al-Wafid(997-c.1074), known in Latin Europe as Abenguefit, was a pharmacologist and physician from Toledo. He was the vizier of  Al-Mamun of Toledo. His main work is Kitāb al-adwiya al-mufrada (The Book of Simple Drugs) (كتاب الأدوية المفردة, translated into Latin as De medicamentis simplicibus).
Ibn al-Wafid was mainly a pharmacist in Toledo, and he used the techniques and methods available in alchemy to extract at least 520 different kinds of medicines from various plants and herbs.
Ibn al-Wafid's student Ali Ibn al-Lukuh was the author of ʿUmdat al-Ṭabīb fī Maʿrifat al-Nabāt li kulli Labīb, a famous botanical dictionary.
Kitāb al-adwiya al-mufrada (The Book of Simple Drugs) ran to five hundred pages, taking twenty-five years to compile.  The Latin translation, De medicamentis simplicibus is only a fragment of all his work.  
As well as investigatin the action of drugs, sleep and bathing, Ibn al-Wafid also wrote on farming, because agriculture, plant cultivation, botany, chemistry and medicine were closely linked.

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