Public Health · a Light

A Granadan doctor argued contagion from what he could see

When the Black Death reached Granada in 1348, some scholars argued that a disease cannot pass from person to person, because that would put the cause somewhere other than in the hands of God. Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib, vizier and physician, wrote a short treatise in reply. He set out the evidence of the senses: that whoever nurses the sick catches it and whoever stays away does not, that it arrives in a port with a ship, that it runs through a household and through a quarter, that people cut off by desert or by sea escape it. He wrote that a proof drawn from transmitted authority has to be reconsidered when experience contradicts it. His colleague Ibn Khatima wrote a similar account at Almeria the following year. Ibn al-Khatib died in a prison cell in Fez in 1374, in a political quarrel.

Ibn al-Khatib · Granada, 1348 to 1349