An article on Psychiatry during medievel Islam period

From the fifth century AD until the past century, Galen's theory about the four humours ruled medicine. Its corollary was that the treatment of disease involved getting the humours back in order; releasing them through bloodletting was the most common procedure, often augmented by other means of freeing bodily fluids (e.g. purgatives and laxatives). For 14 centuries, physicians subscribed to this wondrous biological theory of disease: they bled their patients until they lost their entire blood supply; they forced them to puke and defecate and urinate; they alternated extremely hot showers with extremely frigid ones – all in the name of normalizing those humours . Yet, it all proved to be wrong.Most medieval Christian physicians believed that mental illness was caused by either demonic possession or as punishment from a god, which led to a negative attitude towards mental illness. On the other hand, Islamic ethics and theology held a more sympathetic attitude towards the mentally ill. Muslim physicians relied mostly on clinical observations. The first psychiatric hospitals were built in the medieval Islamic world from the 8th century. The first was built in Baghdad in 705, followed by Fes in the early 8th century, and Cairo in 800. They were the first to provide psychotherapy and moral treatment for mentally ill patients, in addition to other forms of treatment such as baths, drug medication, music therapy and occupational therapy. Such institutions could not exist in Europe at the time, because of European fears of demonic possession. The Persian physician Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) (865-925) wrote the landmark texts El-Mansuri and Al-Hawi in the 10th century, which presented definitions, symptoms, and treatments combined psychological methods and physiological explanations to provide treatment to mentally ill patients. Avicenna (980-1037) was an early pioneer of neuropsychiatry, and first to described a number of neuropsychiatric conditions such as hallucination, insomnia, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy, paralysis, stroke, vertigo and tremor. Avicenna identified LOVE SICKNESS (Ishq) when he was treating a very ill patient by "feeling the patient's pulse and reciting aloud to him the names of provinces, districts, towns, streets, and people." He noticed how the patient's pulse increased when certain names were mentioned, from which Avicenna deduced that the patient was in love with a girl whose home Avicenna was "able to locate by the digital examination. " Avicenna advised the patient to marry the girl he is in love with, and the patient soon recovered from his illness after his marriage. Avicenna also gave psychological explanations for certain somatic illnesses, and he always linked the physical and psychological illnesses together.Al-Kindi (801–873) was the first to realize the therapeutic value of music. He was the first to experiment with music therapy, and he attempted to cure a quadriplegic boy using this method.Later in the 9th century, al-Farabi also dealt with music therapy in his treatise Meanings of the Intellect, where he discussed the therapeutic effects of music on the soul.Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari's Firdous al-Hikmah written in the 9th century was the first work to study 'al-‘ilaj al-nafs (translated as "psychotherapy" from Arabic) in the treatment of patients. His ideas were primarily influenced by early Islamic thought and ancient Indian physicians such as SUSHRUTA and CHARAKA.The Muslim physician Abu Zayd Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi (850-934) was a pioneer of al-‘ilaj al-nafs, and the first to compare "physical and psychological disorders" and show "their interaction in causing psychosomatic disorders.
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Islamic_psycholo gyHaque, Amber (2004), "Psychology from Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim Scholars and Challenges to Contemporary Muslim Psychologists" , Journal of Religion and Health 43 (4): 357-377.