The medical section of the Kit?b al-Na???atayn or Book of the Two Pieces of Advice by the medieval author cAbd al-La??f ibn Y?suf al-Baghd?d? (1162-1231) challenges the idea that Arabic-Islamic medicine declined after the twelfth century A.D. Moreover, it offers some interesting insights into the social history of medicine. cAbd al-La??f composed his work as a diatribe directed against false knowledge, and employed the framework of Greek medical epistemology to criticize the rationalist physicians of his day and age. He argued that female and itinerant practitioners, relying on experience, were superior to some rationalists, and decried the wickedness and incompetence of certain medical practitioners of his time. In addition, he lambasted contemporaneous medical education because it put too much faith in a restricted number of textbooks such as the Canon of Medicine by the celebrated physician Ibn S?n? (Avicenna), or chiefly relied on imperfect abridgments. The medical section of the Book of the Two Pieces of Advice is translated here for the first time in a modern language. It is preceded by a lengthy introduction that highlights cAbd al-La??fs complicated relation to both medicine and alchemy. The present study also contains the first full bibliography on cAbd al-La??f ibn Y?suf al-Baghd?d? and his milieu.

N. Peter Joosse was a fellow-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and a senior research fellow at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Leiden. In 2010, he joined the Department of Classics & Ancient History of the University of Warwick as a Wellcome Trust research fellow to work on cAbd al-La??f ibn Y?suf al-Baghd?d? Arabic commentary on the Hippocratic Prognostic. In 2013 he joined the University of Oxford based project on Ibn ab? U?aybica.