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QUST IBN L Q 'S PHYSICAL LIGATURES and the RECOGNITION of the PLACEBO EFFECT with an Edition and Translation JUDITH WILCO

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QUST IBN L Q 'S PHYSICAL LIGATURES and the RECOGNITION of the PLACEBO EFFECT with an Edition and Translation JUDITH WILCO QUST� IBN L�Q�'S PHYSICAL LIGATURES AND THE RECOGNITION OF THE PLACEBO EFFECT With an Edition and Translation JUDITH WILCOX and JOHN M. RIDDLE On first reading one might be inclined, as we were, to relegate this ninth-century treatise on magic to what Augustine Birrell called "that great dust-heap called history" as an example of best forgotten lore. After all, any advice about contraception is almost amusing that calls for elephant dung to be mixed with horse's milk, tied in stag-skin and suspended over the woman's navel. Or, to prevent conception for a year, a woman should spit into a frog's open mouth. Or, to increase sexual desire, one should tie a wild goat's eye with sweet marjoram roots moistened with a red bull's urine released in the evening. Early the next day one places the eye so prepared on the shoulder, and he or she will have increased libido. Such worn or carried remedies were "ligatures and suspensions, in which objects are hung from the neck or bound to some part of the body in order to ward off danger from without or cure internal disease."' 1 The author is the renowned Qusta ibn Luqa (ca. 830-910 A.D.), a Melkite Christian born in or near Baalbek, Syria who during a long career first in Baghdad and then in Armenia was credited with dozens of translations of Greek scientific works to Arabic and the authorship of around 90 works on various subjects, mostly scientific.' About half of I ' Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and ExperimentalScience I (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923) 89. Thorndike's eight volume work is loaded with examples of magical works containing such devices from the time of the Roman Pliny to the seven- teenth century. 2 For the details of life and work see "The Transmission and Qust;i's Judith Wilcox, " Influence of Qusta ibn Luqa's 'On the Difference Between Spirit and the Soul.' Dissert. (City University of New York, 1985); Giuseppi Gabrieli, "Nota biobibliographica su Qusta Ibn Luqa," Rendiconti dellaAccademia dei Lincei. Classedi scienze morali, storichee filologiche,5th ser. 21 (1912): 341-82; Judith Wilcox, "Our Continuing Discovery of the Greek Science of the Arabs: The Example of Qusta ibn Luqa," Annals oj Scholarship4 (No. 3, 1987): 57-74; E. Wiedemann in: Encyclopaediaof Islam (lst ed.) 2, 1081-3; E. Ruth Harvey in: Dictionaryof ScientificBiography (New York: Scribners, 1975) 244-6; Fuat Sezgin, Geschichtedes ArabischenSchrifttums (Leiden: E.,J. Brill, 1970-8) III, 270-3; V, 285-6 et passim. ; VI, 180-2. 2 these were medical works of all kinds, learned and popular, lengthy and short. Extant only in Latin, Physical Ligatures, or On Incantations, Adjura- tions, and Suspensions Around the Neck, as it was also known, is brief and, at first glance, popular, but it is also singularly profound and innovative. Far from being a mere magical treatise, it is a learned, "high medicine" text on the empirical use of magic. Qustä's treatise may have been the first to recognize the placebo effect as part of medical practice. As such, it is unusual and significant because it gave new perspectives on the treat- ment of mental disorders. We have clear indications in the form of manu- scripts and numerous early modern printings that Physical Ligatures was widely read in the West, and further indications of its continuing influ- ence by its citation in other medieval works. Nevertheless, it seems that Qustä's clear statement of the placebo effect went largely unheeded even while the occult remedies he listed were read and cited. The framework in which Qusta discusses these occult remedies and prophylactics is a consideration, in the form of a letter, of whether Greek medicine, grounded as it is in the rationalism of the Hippocratic and Galenic tradition, has employed "incantations, adjurations and suspen- sions about the neck" so relied upon in Indian medicine, and whether these things are effective. In the best tradition of Greek medicine, Qusta sketches the theory of humoral balance and its role in physical and men- tal health. To this he adds, on no less authority than Plato, the idea that the mere belief in the efficacy of a remedy will indeed help in a cure. He gives many examples drawn from many Greek sources of remedies whose efficacy cannot be rationally explained, that is, occult remedies. In the end, he does not endorse these as being genuinely effective. They might help, he says, because of the "strengthening of the mind," the belief that they will work. On the other hand, he says, he cannot deny that they really work, because we cannot understand the operation of many things in nature by reason, but by their "properties," which are known from "having been tested" and proven to be true, such as a magnet's power to draw iron. It is not really surprising that in a serious tract about medicine Qusta should have been taking at look at remedies which we would call magical. He is acknowledging a conflict that had been long inherent in the science of the Greeks. On one hand, there was the classical formulation of Greek science that natural phenomena can be known by their "essence" or def- inition, which has been arrived at by observation and then held to be immutable; according to this view, knowledge of nature was accessible by reason and analysis building upon the essences of things determined .
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