Abu Mansur al-Qumri

Abu Mansur al-Hasan ibn Nuh al-Qumri was a physician who lived and worked in Bukhara in the 10th century. The dates of his life are not known exactly: Uzbek publications place his birth in the early 10th century and name Bukhara as his home town, while Western reference works say only that he practised in Bukhara around the middle of the century. “Al-Qumri” (sometimes written “al-Qamari”) in his name is a nisba.

Qumri was a court physician of the Samanids. According to some accounts he served the emir Mansur ibn Nuh (961–976); the 13th-century biographer Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a calls him the leading physician of his generation, a master of medical theory with praiseworthy methods, and says that rulers held him in esteem.

Medieval and modern tradition names Qumri among Ibn Sina’s teachers of medicine. But Ibn Sina was born in 980, and if Qumri died between 980 and 990, direct tutoring is unlikely: Ibn Sina may rather have used his writings. In his own account of how he learned medicine, Ibn Sina names no teacher.

According to Uzbek sources Qumri wrote eight medical works, of which two survive. The first is “Kitab al-ghina wa-l-muna” (“The Book of Wealth and Wishes”), a medical handbook in three parts — diseases from head to foot, external diseases and fevers — known in Persian as “Kunnash-i Abu Mansur”. It gives information on more than thirty physicians, predecessors and contemporaries of the author, and dozens of its manuscripts are kept in libraries in Asia, Africa and Europe. It is one of the large medical works written in Bukhara shortly before Ibn Sina’s “Canon of Medicine”.

The second is “Kitab at-tanwir fi-l-istilahat at-tibbiyya” (“The Book of Illumination on Medical Terms”), a glossary explaining more than 350 medical terms, among them diets, drinks and instruments used by physicians. It was translated into Persian in the 16th century and has since been published in a scholarly edition. A third work, “The Causes of Maladies”, is presumed lost.

Qumri died between 980 and 990 (some historians put his death around 999) and was buried in Bukhara.