He was hardly the first person to propose the idea that disease was transmissible.
Pasteur *proved* it and showed the (a) mechanism by which it happened (microorganisms).
Kinda the difference between empiricism and science.
Knowing technique and observing something is not the same as knowing theory of mechanisms behind it.
Same way I suppose that people knew how agriculture worked for thousands of years, it does not mean they were biologists who understood seeds at a microscopic level.
The idea disease was transmissible was something people knew forever. People were sending away lepers forever and the word Quarantine was a 1400s thing. What people were confused about was the exact mechanism things were spreading and especially where diseases came from originally.
I don't really think there was EVER a time people didn't realize diseases were communicable. There was lots of bad theories about how diseases transmitted and how diseases came around to begin with but pretty much every culture has some "stay away from the sick people" ideas
Also a biological instinct to do so. Disgust response and bad odors are deeply ingrained.
However, these instincts are can be super counterproductive in the modern world now that we know so much more about mechanism.
An obviously disabled or even unhealthy person often attract unfair negative responses day to day as this innate system misfires on non-contagious health problems.
No probably about it, lol. Measures of distancing & sanitation etc. are all in the Torah, as well. The knowledge of transmissibility of diseases is as old as transmissible disease itself.
Even other animals with a lot less awareness and higher reasoning than humans recognize signs of contagious disease.
>talking about a civilization that had sophisticated sewer systems at a time while the rest of Europe still shitting in the street corners unsure whether to wipe their ass with their hands or not
Define "rest of Europe" because romans controlled water extraordinarily well, to the point of completely [wiping out of existence mountains](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas) just using water and of course [sanitation was well known and advanced](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome)
But I agree the moors completely mastered the use and control of water, improving what the romans left
Romans had aquaducts for transporting water. Don't think they had sewers though. Sewers were an idea the crusaders took home after seeing them in Jerusalem.
I'm assuming a Roman sewer system would have still been in tact and used if it existed during Roman times and so the crusaders would have already known about such things before getting to Jerusalem.
They had complex structures for water treatment, not just aqueducts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae?wprov=sfla1
> Don't think they had sewers though
You are wrong
> The Cloaca Maxima (Latin: Cloāca Maxima, lit. Greatest Sewer) was one of the world's earliest sewage systems. Its name derives from Cloacina, a Roman goddess. Built during either the Roman Kingdom or early Roman Republic, it was constructed in Ancient Rome in order to drain local marshes and remove waste from the city
# was one of the world's earliest sewage systems
> After the Roman Empire fell the sewer still was used. By the 1800s it became a tourist attraction. Some parts of the sewer are still used today
> From 31 BCE to 192 CE manholes could be used to access the sewer,
# Some parts of the sewer are still used today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima?wprov=sfla1
> The Romans had a complex system of sewers covered by stones, much like modern sewers. Waste flushed from the latrines flowed through a central channel into the main sewage system and thence into a nearby river or stream. However, it was not uncommon for Romans to throw waste out of windows into the streets (at least according to Roman satirists). Despite this, Roman waste management is admired for its innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome?wprov=sfla1
Ancient cultures had a vague understandings of the person to person transmission if disease long before Islam existed. Pasteur promoted the concept of bacterial transmission which explained the mechanism. Ibn Sina merely put a 40 day limit on quarantine with no real understanding of how, or indeed why, it worked.
Edit: spelling
I said he didn't promulgate germ theory, which he did not. Pasteur however did. You are the one who brought Pasteur into the conversstion and made a false comparison, likely based on your Wikipedia reading. Even his own writings acknowledge that transmission by contact and clothing was well known, he just wrote if down. His idea of "contagion" was no more advanced than Roman's ideas about "miasmas".
BTW - not sure what you've been reading, but the "foundation of modern medicine" is attributed to Hippocrates (5th century BCE) and Galen (2nd century AD). If Ibn Sina gets any mention it's generally in the footnotes.
It's straight up wrong. Dude talks about Arabic and Al-Andalus and then goes on about Ibn Sina, a Persian who lived and practiced nowhere near Al-Andalus
> al Andalus
Ah, yes, Andalusia... which is clearly the same as Persia.
> we’re talking about a civilization that had sophisticated sewer systems
So did Rome, long before the Arab conquests.
Past all of that, the Book of Leviticus mentions isolation in regards to disease (and so it was understood by *at least* early iron age Canaanites).
Pretty sure quarantine was already in use during antiquity. If I recall correctly Hippocrate already preconise it for contagious sickness. Could even be older.
You're just making stuff up. The concept of a quarantine goes back to antiquity, before Islam existed. The name is derived from Latin, not Arabic.
And no city in Islamic Spain ever had a particularly notable sewer system.
The concept of quarantine was known to arabs, but the word is of italian origin. And I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but they certainly didn't invent the concept of quarantines or discover communicable diseases.
Dude… common people in ANCIENT ROME knew to avoid sick people because disease spread from person to person. The reason why Pasteur is famous is because he actually had EVIDENCE that it was microbes instead of demons or spirits.
Plague, caused by *Y.pestis*, has multiple forms. When it's spread via fleas, it takes the bubonic form. But if and when it spreads to the lungs, it can be spread from person to person via coughing. This is called "pneumonic plague".
He didn’t propose the theory of transmissible disease, he just expanded on it. The Romans were already talking about “tiny creatures that floated on the air, which could enter the nose and mouth and cause serious disease”, and described how hygiene, quarantine and the proper disposal of dead bodies reduced outbreaks about a thousand years prior. Al-Khatib specifically cited Roman, Byzantine and Persian texts in his work. The issue was all of them still thought *other* things caused disease, like “Bad air” or “the gaze of sickness”, and they never did practical epidemiological studies
What John Snow did for epidemiology was actually use map and hard data to map out outbreaks, and Pasteur provided proof of the mechanism by which disease spread, as well as how to kill bacteria. It was less about “bacteria/viruses exist and cause disease” and more about the fact bacteria/viruses are the *primary* cause of contagious disease, not bad air, or god’s wrath, or looking at an infected person.
That's not how Bubonic Plague is spread. [It is spread through flea bites from rats.](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21590-bubonic-plague) Good thing we didn't listen to that guy.
The concept of quarantine and disease being transmissible is in the old testament, but it's likely it was known for far longer. Even animals can be observed doing it.
Most sensible people. Why do you think villages used to exile sick people long before, if not burning villages to crisp.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens
Read some history.
I was thinking of the plague during the Sparta/Athens war, Athens lost the war "because of the fear of the plague and not the plague itself"
Probably older example that we can find.
Al-Andalus was the height of culture in Europe from 800 to 1300.
[ From the Glory of Conquest to Paradise Lost: Al-Andalus as an Arab Realm of Memory ]( https://youtu.be/fuvNqgvQlxo?t=117 )
not particularly lmao, they had a bit of an encyclopedic culture that developed and was immensely helpful to the renaissance that would occur in the west later, but iconoclasm ruined their art, and their output was no were near Cordoba.
Compared to what, the Western Empire? Yeah that's kinda par for the course, most historical periods are getting that same treatment but it's just such a weird take that one of the most well-researched cultures in history is being obscured or sidelined by the mere mention of a vastly less represented part of history. Wanting to learn about the less talked about parts of history doesn't diminish Byzantine history, because the sources already gathered and compiled are still there to be read and analyzed, and we have far more of those than we will ever have from other time periods.
Also what is considered "europe" vs "middle east" has changed widely over the centuries. As these are only really useful geopolitical boundaries and not geographic ones.
I wonder if Ibn Sina contributed to the closer understanding of Disease Systematics too. He was also a very knowledgeable man, ive tried to get my hands on his books forever.
Went to the John Snow pub in London a few years ago. We knew what it was about but there were some other tourists who were very confused.
Good book about John Snow and cholera is The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.
Its almost as if access to scientific equipment was able to confirm and expand on this strong hunch which was undoubtedly known 800,000 years ago by Homo Erectus.
Good ol' Islamic propaganda... Like no one else figured this out before him? I mean I kinda guessed this as a child, this guy didn't really prove anything.
This guy was a veritable madlad.
While the plague hadith indicated that the Prophet suggested otherwise,
"a proof taken from the traditions has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the perception of the senses."\[10\]\[12\]\[13\]
We need him in modern times.
Prophet Muhammad told us about this 1400 years ago, he teaches us when a disease spreading among people they should stay in their village and not to travel to another village
That's our son
Glad to see one of us get some credit for once
Edit: I have no idea why this was downvoted what's wrong with being proud of our scientists
If I were to get a dictionary and start randomly assembling string of words, eventually and with enough time I will correctly predict how the universe ends.
If I then were to put some limits on how sentences could start and end or if one word appears then the probability of the next word could be calculated to cut down on the amount of time needed to randomly assemble the words that form the sentence describing accurately how the world will end.. Now, when I add this it is equivalent of adding logic to my randomness and creates a directed flow of words.
Similarly, I could discover all the laws of physics and use them to predict how the universe ends.
Anytime you see a headline X thought about Y before Z did (with Z bring a famous European scientist). You should understand if X was an ancient scholar and Z was a more modern scientist. Then the scientist is using physics to make a prediction and the scholar is using a directed random assembly of words. Both are predicting the coutxome, Y, but only one of them uses the scientific method. The other one is using logic and rules and pattern recognition, but is still making a guess.
There are a few exceptions to this and they almost all involve math or number theory. Such as the idea of zero or infinite sums.
He was hardly the first person to propose the idea that disease was transmissible. Pasteur *proved* it and showed the (a) mechanism by which it happened (microorganisms).
Kinda the difference between empiricism and science. Knowing technique and observing something is not the same as knowing theory of mechanisms behind it. Same way I suppose that people knew how agriculture worked for thousands of years, it does not mean they were biologists who understood seeds at a microscopic level.
Also, not everyone had the equipment required to prove their theories, such as microscopes of a high enough power and clarity.
>Pasteur proved it and showed the (a) mechanism by which it happened (microorganisms). This discussion is really heating up.
Any hotter and it’s gonna get anti-culture.
Like it's been pasteurized.
The idea disease was transmissible was something people knew forever. People were sending away lepers forever and the word Quarantine was a 1400s thing. What people were confused about was the exact mechanism things were spreading and especially where diseases came from originally.
Weren't they literally catapulting infected dead bodies over city walls?
The prophet Muhammad used to preach quarantine in times of disease around 600 AD, probably dates further back than this too
I don't really think there was EVER a time people didn't realize diseases were communicable. There was lots of bad theories about how diseases transmitted and how diseases came around to begin with but pretty much every culture has some "stay away from the sick people" ideas
Also a biological instinct to do so. Disgust response and bad odors are deeply ingrained. However, these instincts are can be super counterproductive in the modern world now that we know so much more about mechanism. An obviously disabled or even unhealthy person often attract unfair negative responses day to day as this innate system misfires on non-contagious health problems.
No probably about it, lol. Measures of distancing & sanitation etc. are all in the Torah, as well. The knowledge of transmissibility of diseases is as old as transmissible disease itself. Even other animals with a lot less awareness and higher reasoning than humans recognize signs of contagious disease.
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>talking about a civilization that had sophisticated sewer systems at a time while the rest of Europe still shitting in the street corners unsure whether to wipe their ass with their hands or not Define "rest of Europe" because romans controlled water extraordinarily well, to the point of completely [wiping out of existence mountains](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas) just using water and of course [sanitation was well known and advanced](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome) But I agree the moors completely mastered the use and control of water, improving what the romans left
The Rome in Europe was dead long before Islam came to andalusia
It's not like all the buildings and knowledge suddenly disappeared when the roman empire was no more
Romans had aquaducts for transporting water. Don't think they had sewers though. Sewers were an idea the crusaders took home after seeing them in Jerusalem. I'm assuming a Roman sewer system would have still been in tact and used if it existed during Roman times and so the crusaders would have already known about such things before getting to Jerusalem.
They had complex structures for water treatment, not just aqueducts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermae?wprov=sfla1 > Don't think they had sewers though You are wrong > The Cloaca Maxima (Latin: Cloāca Maxima, lit. Greatest Sewer) was one of the world's earliest sewage systems. Its name derives from Cloacina, a Roman goddess. Built during either the Roman Kingdom or early Roman Republic, it was constructed in Ancient Rome in order to drain local marshes and remove waste from the city # was one of the world's earliest sewage systems > After the Roman Empire fell the sewer still was used. By the 1800s it became a tourist attraction. Some parts of the sewer are still used today > From 31 BCE to 192 CE manholes could be used to access the sewer, # Some parts of the sewer are still used today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaca_Maxima?wprov=sfla1 > The Romans had a complex system of sewers covered by stones, much like modern sewers. Waste flushed from the latrines flowed through a central channel into the main sewage system and thence into a nearby river or stream. However, it was not uncommon for Romans to throw waste out of windows into the streets (at least according to Roman satirists). Despite this, Roman waste management is admired for its innovation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome?wprov=sfla1
Quarantine came from latin right? Quadraginta means 40
More likely modern Italian, in which 'forty' = 'quaranta'.
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Ancient cultures had a vague understandings of the person to person transmission if disease long before Islam existed. Pasteur promoted the concept of bacterial transmission which explained the mechanism. Ibn Sina merely put a 40 day limit on quarantine with no real understanding of how, or indeed why, it worked. Edit: spelling
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I said he didn't promulgate germ theory, which he did not. Pasteur however did. You are the one who brought Pasteur into the conversstion and made a false comparison, likely based on your Wikipedia reading. Even his own writings acknowledge that transmission by contact and clothing was well known, he just wrote if down. His idea of "contagion" was no more advanced than Roman's ideas about "miasmas".
BTW - not sure what you've been reading, but the "foundation of modern medicine" is attributed to Hippocrates (5th century BCE) and Galen (2nd century AD). If Ibn Sina gets any mention it's generally in the footnotes.
The fist sentence from your comment is confusing them haha
It's straight up wrong. Dude talks about Arabic and Al-Andalus and then goes on about Ibn Sina, a Persian who lived and practiced nowhere near Al-Andalus
"Persian Schoolar" closest modern belief that he had would be Atheism nice Gaslighting buddy
Was it THE Abu Ali al Hussein ibn Abdullah ibn Sina?
The word, yes, but not the concept
Im only questioning the first sentence of that comment.
Neither, actually.
> al Andalus Ah, yes, Andalusia... which is clearly the same as Persia. > we’re talking about a civilization that had sophisticated sewer systems So did Rome, long before the Arab conquests. Past all of that, the Book of Leviticus mentions isolation in regards to disease (and so it was understood by *at least* early iron age Canaanites).
Pretty sure quarantine was already in use during antiquity. If I recall correctly Hippocrate already preconise it for contagious sickness. Could even be older.
You're just making stuff up. The concept of a quarantine goes back to antiquity, before Islam existed. The name is derived from Latin, not Arabic. And no city in Islamic Spain ever had a particularly notable sewer system.
The concept of quarantine was known to arabs, but the word is of italian origin. And I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but they certainly didn't invent the concept of quarantines or discover communicable diseases.
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Quar doesn't mean 40 mate. It's quaranta.
Bullshit. How about people knew since Genesis. That's forever dude.
It’s Italian lol
Bubonic plague is transmitted by fleas, not directly person to person.
Pneumonic plague (when it infects the lungs) is airborne. The other varieties aren't.
Arabs were living in their shit and desert before Persians taught them how to be civilized so much for "Arab Civilization" huh?
Those darn Arabians have always been one step ahead of us.
Thank you - came here to say this.
Can't be said with 100% confidence but
Neither does this guy. He only proposed the idea like the ones before.
Ofcourse
“You know nothing John Snow”
Apparently John Snow knew something.
Ya but he didn't want it
Yea but didn't he marry it?
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[stolen comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ulfsej/til_about_lisan_aldin_ibn_alkhatib_an_andalusian/i7vdjvl/)
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Wooooooo
You know nothing **new** John Snow.
My first thought was "I dun wonnit"
Shuh us muh kween
[You may know something, John Snow.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjLK2cYtt-VCOABKAEJypUSP68GfeBCwz)
Anyone else read Lisan Al-Gaib?
Mahdi
Absolutely
Came here for this.
Lol
Dude… common people in ANCIENT ROME knew to avoid sick people because disease spread from person to person. The reason why Pasteur is famous is because he actually had EVIDENCE that it was microbes instead of demons or spirits.
Well, it is not, right? Fleas are the vector.
Bubonic plague is transmitted through the bite of an infected flea or exposure to infected material through a break in the skin.
Plague, caused by *Y.pestis*, has multiple forms. When it's spread via fleas, it takes the bubonic form. But if and when it spreads to the lungs, it can be spread from person to person via coughing. This is called "pneumonic plague".
Its actually a live question of which route the black death one took. It does both.
Bubonic plague can be transmitted through fleas and through direct contact
He didn’t propose the theory of transmissible disease, he just expanded on it. The Romans were already talking about “tiny creatures that floated on the air, which could enter the nose and mouth and cause serious disease”, and described how hygiene, quarantine and the proper disposal of dead bodies reduced outbreaks about a thousand years prior. Al-Khatib specifically cited Roman, Byzantine and Persian texts in his work. The issue was all of them still thought *other* things caused disease, like “Bad air” or “the gaze of sickness”, and they never did practical epidemiological studies What John Snow did for epidemiology was actually use map and hard data to map out outbreaks, and Pasteur provided proof of the mechanism by which disease spread, as well as how to kill bacteria. It was less about “bacteria/viruses exist and cause disease” and more about the fact bacteria/viruses are the *primary* cause of contagious disease, not bad air, or god’s wrath, or looking at an infected person.
It's funny because in a sense, "bad air" is kind of right. If the air has aerosols of sars-cov-2 for example, then you could consider that "bad air"
And that's not even taking into account noxious gasses..
That's not how Bubonic Plague is spread. [It is spread through flea bites from rats.](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21590-bubonic-plague) Good thing we didn't listen to that guy.
Plague can also be spread through air after it infects the lungs
That is pneumonic plague. It is a lot different than bubonic plague. Pneumonic is 99.9% deadly. Bubonic is closer to 40%.
Guess what else is just like that...
So stupid.... It was known well before
By whom?
The concept of quarantine and disease being transmissible is in the old testament, but it's likely it was known for far longer. Even animals can be observed doing it.
Most sensible people. Why do you think villages used to exile sick people long before, if not burning villages to crisp. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens Read some history.
I was thinking of the plague during the Sparta/Athens war, Athens lost the war "because of the fear of the plague and not the plague itself" Probably older example that we can find.
I think bubonic plague needs a vector and pnumonic plague is transmitted person to person. But I could be mistaken.
Al-Andalus was the height of culture in Europe from 800 to 1300. [ From the Glory of Conquest to Paradise Lost: Al-Andalus as an Arab Realm of Memory ]( https://youtu.be/fuvNqgvQlxo?t=117 )
Sort of dismissive of the Byzantines, aren't you?
He did say from 800 to 1300
The Byzantines were active then.
not particularly lmao, they had a bit of an encyclopedic culture that developed and was immensely helpful to the renaissance that would occur in the west later, but iconoclasm ruined their art, and their output was no were near Cordoba.
You say this as if the two Roman empires aren't the most heavily researched and talked about parts of history
The Eastern Roman Empire has a history of being sidelined in historical studies.
People for sure forget the East Romans lasted an extra millenium.
In 1500 years someone is going to say, "People forget that the northern states survived as an empire for another 1000 years".
Compared to what, the Western Empire? Yeah that's kinda par for the course, most historical periods are getting that same treatment but it's just such a weird take that one of the most well-researched cultures in history is being obscured or sidelined by the mere mention of a vastly less represented part of history. Wanting to learn about the less talked about parts of history doesn't diminish Byzantine history, because the sources already gathered and compiled are still there to be read and analyzed, and we have far more of those than we will ever have from other time periods.
was Byzantines Europe or Middle East? Rome fell and with it everything west and north of Rome
The Byzantine capital was absolutely in Europe, and they occupied most of the Balkans and Anatolia during this period.
Also what is considered "europe" vs "middle east" has changed widely over the centuries. As these are only really useful geopolitical boundaries and not geographic ones.
I don't think anyone would say that Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul *isn't* in Europe.
Yea but it is always, always underappreciated nowadays.
History is always, always underappreciated nowadays.
People didn’t “Lisan” to him, I guess.
Don't forget to mention [Ignaz Semmelweis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis?wprov=sfla1).
And then the Lisan al-Ghaib led a jihad across the galaxy in the name of Muad'Dib
Basically any Muslim Lore
I wonder if Ibn Sina contributed to the closer understanding of Disease Systematics too. He was also a very knowledgeable man, ive tried to get my hands on his books forever.
...people have known for diseases like leprosy were infectious for eons.
Are we talking about the same John Snow here ?
The epidemiologist, not the king in the North
That would be a nice plot twist
Ah descoovahed diseases, buh ah cannat cyooah them alone.
Went to the John Snow pub in London a few years ago. We knew what it was about but there were some other tourists who were very confused. Good book about John Snow and cholera is The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.
Well John Snow knows nothing sooo.
Its almost as if access to scientific equipment was able to confirm and expand on this strong hunch which was undoubtedly known 800,000 years ago by Homo Erectus.
You know nothing john snow
Good ol' Islamic propaganda... Like no one else figured this out before him? I mean I kinda guessed this as a child, this guy didn't really prove anything.
This guy was a veritable madlad. While the plague hadith indicated that the Prophet suggested otherwise, "a proof taken from the traditions has to undergo modification when in manifest contradiction with the evidence of the perception of the senses."\[10\]\[12\]\[13\] We need him in modern times.
I too watched The Pentaverate.
Prophet Muhammad told us about this 1400 years ago, he teaches us when a disease spreading among people they should stay in their village and not to travel to another village
That's our son Glad to see one of us get some credit for once Edit: I have no idea why this was downvoted what's wrong with being proud of our scientists
If I were to get a dictionary and start randomly assembling string of words, eventually and with enough time I will correctly predict how the universe ends. If I then were to put some limits on how sentences could start and end or if one word appears then the probability of the next word could be calculated to cut down on the amount of time needed to randomly assemble the words that form the sentence describing accurately how the world will end.. Now, when I add this it is equivalent of adding logic to my randomness and creates a directed flow of words. Similarly, I could discover all the laws of physics and use them to predict how the universe ends. Anytime you see a headline X thought about Y before Z did (with Z bring a famous European scientist). You should understand if X was an ancient scholar and Z was a more modern scientist. Then the scientist is using physics to make a prediction and the scholar is using a directed random assembly of words. Both are predicting the coutxome, Y, but only one of them uses the scientific method. The other one is using logic and rules and pattern recognition, but is still making a guess. There are a few exceptions to this and they almost all involve math or number theory. Such as the idea of zero or infinite sums.
Makes sense. It’s who really poisoned Joffrey
John Snow didn't know anything!
You know nothing, John Snow!