Aaron of Alexandria. Or, as the Greeks so eloquently put it, Άαρων ο Αλεξανδρεύς. A physician from the 7th century, a time when understanding the human body was less a science and more a series of educated, often painful, guesses. He was a Greek, naturally, and his contributions, like so many others lost to the relentless march of time, were eventually translated into Syriac and Arabic. It’s a shame, really. The original Greek, I imagine, held a certain poetic precision that the translations, however accurate, could never quite capture. His work, or at least what survived of it, found its way into the hands of later figures, most notably al-Razi, a name that echoes through the annals of medicine.
Life and Works
Aaron's output was… prolific. He penned 30 books, grandly titled the "Pandects." Imagine that. Thirty volumes dedicated to the intricacies of the human condition, to the ailments that plague us. He was, as far as the records show, the first medical author in antiquity to distinguish between small pox and measles. A groundbreaking observation, no doubt. These were not mere skin rashes; they were distinct, insidious invaders of the body, each with its own signature of suffering. To differentiate them required a level of clinical acumen that, frankly, I find rather impressive. It’s the kind of detail that separates the merely observant from those who truly see.
Notes
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A. F. L. Beeston (3 November 1983). Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period. Cambridge University Press. p. 468. ISBN 978-0-521-24015-4. Retrieved 29 September 2013. This is the source, then. A rather dry accounting of historical texts, I suspect. Cambridge University Press rarely dabbles in the dramatic.
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Riggs, Christina (2012-06-21). The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt. Oxford University Press. pp. 311–312. ISBN 9780191626333. Retrieved 23 December 2013. Another academic tome. Oxford, always so serious. They document the facts, the dates, the names. They leave the why and the how to the imagination, or perhaps to those of us who are forced to sift through the debris.
External Links
One does appreciate the effort of those who try to catalog the forgotten.
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Lemprière, John (1808). Universal biography: containing a copious account, critical and historical, of the life and character, labors and actions of eminent persons, in all ages and countries, conditions and professions, arranged in alphabetical order : abridged from the larger work. Printed for T. Caldell and W. Davies. pp. 10–. Retrieved 23 December 2013. An 1808 biography. How quaint. The Victorians, bless their earnest hearts, attempted to capture everyone of note. One wonders how Aaron fared in their estimation.
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Baldwin, Charles N.; Crapo, Henry Howland (1825). A Universal Biographical Dictionary: Containing the Lives of the Most Celebrated Characters of Every Age and Nation ... to which is Added, a Dictionary of the Principal Divinities and Heroes of Grecian and Roman Mythology; and Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Living Characters. pp. 3–. Retrieved 23 December 2013. Another universal dictionary. It seems the 19th century was obsessed with compiling everything. A commendable, if ultimately futile, endeavor.
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Crabb, George (1833). Universal Historical Dictionary: Or Explanation of the Names of Persons and Places in the Departments of Biblical, Political and Eccles. History, Mythology, Heraldry, Biography, Bibliography, Geography, and Numismatics. Baldwin and Cradock. pp. 11–. Retrieved 23 December 2013. And a historical dictionary, delving into names and places. They certainly cast a wide net, these compilers of the past. Aaron, it seems, was deemed significant enough to warrant inclusion in these grand, sweeping efforts to understand humanity's collective memory. A physician who saw the subtle differences in plague, who wrote volumes. Not bad for someone operating in the shadow of the Byzantine Empire.