Ibn Jumay'

Origins and early life

Hibat Allah ibn Zayn ibn Jumay' was born in Fustat, the old city of Cairo, in the first half of the twelfth century, into a Jewish family, and the epithet by which the Arabic biographers know him, al-Isra'ili, 'the Israelite', says what he was; unlike several of the Jewish physicians of the Ayyubid court, he never converted, and lived and died a Jew, a contemporary and fellow townsman of Maimonides.

Work and career

He studied medicine under the masters of Egypt, practiced in the hospitals of Cairo, and when Saladin took power in 1171 he became the sultan's personal physician and the physician of his viziers, the most eminent doctor of the Ayyubid state. His fame in his lifetime rested on a story that the biographers loved to tell: seeing a funeral procession pass, he noticed that the feet of the corpse stood upright in the bier, declared the man alive, had him taken down and revived him from a cataleptic seizure — a diagnosis by observation that his colleagues took as the mark of genius.

His written work was larger: he composed the first known commentary on the Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina, the Guidance for the Welfare of Souls and Bodies, a manual of hygiene and medicine, a treatise on the lemon, and, addressed to Saladin himself, the Treatise on the Revival of the Art of Medicine, a blunt critique of the decay of medical education in his day — physicians who learned from books alone, without teachers, examinations or practice — and a program of reform under the sultan's authority that historians of Islamic medicine count among the first proposals for the regulation of the profession. He died in Cairo in 1198, five years after the sultan he served.