The medical sects

Al-Masudi relates that physicians disagreed about the methods of medicine in the assembly of al-Wathiq. ²

The people of experience held that things are known through experience, such as the transfer from one organ to a similar organ, and from one medicine to another. The people of reasoning and speculation held that medicine is derived from first premises, such as knowledge of the natures of bodies, organs, airs, and the powers of diseases, and they said this was the view of Hippocrates and Galen. The adherents of mountain medicine (tibb al-jabali) traced diseases back to universal principles without examining their causes. ²