•Usamah's account presents a rare view of medieval medical practice—if such a term can be applied to the ghastly practices in Western Europe at the time. His story of the knight's leg and the insane woman's skull is not for the faint of heart, but it is probably all too accurate, and it illustrates the fact that European "doctors" often blamed diseases on spiritual rather than physical causes. To Us-amah, these practices must have seemed particularly backward, because Arab doctors were among the most highly advanced in the medieval world.
• The reference to making the woman's "humor wet" implies the medieval belief in humors, or bodily fluids such as blood. It appears that Thabit (tah-BEET), the Christian physician referred to—who was probably not a "Frank" but someone from the Middle East—simply intended to get her circulation going, which was probably not a bad idea.
•In another passage, Usamah expressed amazement at the Europeans' relatively open-minded attitudes toward "their" women. In the Muslim world, a man was undisputed master in his house, and most Islamic men of wealth such as Usamah had more than one wife. Thus although attitudes toward women in medieval Europe would hardly be considered forward-thinking by modern standards, to Usamah they were amazing.
•Usamah's observations on the Europeans are colored by his obviously low view of them, which is particularly interesting because Europeans in later centuries would themselves view other peoples, including Arabs, as their inferiors. This attitude was not necessarily the same as hatred, however: Usamah compared the "Franks" to animals that could be either pleasant or unruly depending on how they were handled.
•Not all the place names in this passage are clear; however, it is known that "Sur" was Tyre (TIRE), an ancient city in what is now Lebanon; and that Nablus (NAH-blus) is in the modern nation of Jordan.
Cultures in Conflict: Usamah ibn Munqidh
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Middle Ages: Primary Sources
World History
