To ignore Islamic medicine from 650 to 1500 AD is tantamount to ignore the advance of medicine in general. Although practice was not necessarily perfect, Islamic physicians were far ahead of their counterparts in the West in the development of theories and techniques. As a result Islamic physicians were called upon to treat the great and noble and thereby entered Western culture and exchanged medical, scientific and cultural information with Westerners. Pormann (classics and ancient history, U. of Warwick) and Savage-Smith (history of Islamic science, U. of Oxford) make accessible to the general reader the history of how Islamic medicine developed, what its practitioners understood in theory, how physicians functioned in society, how they practiced (according to preserved case histories) and how magic and religion figured in treatment. Their concluding chapter on how medieval Islamic medicine still influences modern practice is particularly interesting. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)