"On a terrible doctor"
🩺🩹
There’s a doctor-poet whose eyelid’s inverted,
relieve us, God, of his person!
In the morning he visits a patient—
that evening he’ll mourn him in verses.
—ʿArqala al-Kalbī (Syria, d. 1172)
*drunken buffoonery in🧵
🩺🩹
There’s a doctor-poet whose eyelid’s inverted,
relieve us, God, of his person!
In the morning he visits a patient—
that evening he’ll mourn him in verses.
—ʿArqala al-Kalbī (Syria, d. 1172)
*drunken buffoonery in🧵
The poem was written for Abū al-Ḥakam al-Mursī, an Andalusi doctor who moved to Damascus, and who had insulted the poet ʿArqala al-Kalbī.
He really did have the unnerving habit (for a doctor) of writing elegies for living people.
He really did have the unnerving habit (for a doctor) of writing elegies for living people.
His eyelid was also really messed up, apparently because he had a bad fall while very drunk one night.
Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa's (d. 1270) famous book on doctors, ʿUyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ (sec.15.8), which a team led by Emilie Savage-Smith, Simon Swain, & Geert Jan van Gelder have now edited and translated, and is available online from Brill (behind a paywall?).
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