hat he was a fine example of a practitioner of
medicine on the highest professional lines.

With the foundation of the school at Djondisabour in Arabistan or
Khusistan by the Persian monarch Chosroes, some Jewish physicians come
into prominence as teachers, and this is one of the first important
occasions in history when they teach side by side with Christian
colleagues. Djondisabour seems distant from us now, lying as it does in
the province just above the head of the Persian Gulf, and it is a little
hard to understand its becoming a centre of culture and education, yet
according to well-grounded historical traditions students flocked here
from all parts of the world, and its medical instruction particularly
became famous. According to the documents and traditions that we
possess, clinical teaching was the most significant feature of the
school work and made it famous. As a consequence graduates from here
were deemed fully qualified to become professors in other institutions
and were eagerly sought by various medical schools in the East.

With the rise of the strong political power of the Mohammedans enough of
peace came to the East at least to permit the cultivation of arts and
sciences to some extent again, and then at once the eminence of Jewish
physicians, both as teachers and practitioners of medicine, once more
becomes manifest. The first of the race who comes into prominence is
Maser Djawah Ebn Djeldjal, of Basra. To him we owe probably more than to
anyone else the preservation of old scientific writings and the
cultivation of arts and sciences by the Mohammedans. He prevailed on
Caliph Moawia I, whose physician he had become, to cause many foreign
works, and especially those written in Greek, to be translated into
Arabic. He seems to have taken a large share of the labor of the
translation on himself and prevailed upon his pupil, the son of Moawia,
to translate some works on chemistry. The translation for which Maser
Djawah is best known is that of the Pandects of Haroun, a physician of
Alexandria. The translation of this work was made toward the end of the
seventh century. Unfortunately the "Pandects" has not come down to us,
either in original or translation, but we have fragments of the
translation preserved by Rhazes, the distinguished Arabian medical
writer and physician of the ninth century, and there seems no doubt that
it contained the first good description of smallpox, a chapter in
medicine that is o