DAVID BEN SOLOMON

DAVID BEN SOLOMON (Abū al-Faḍl Dāʾūd ibn Abī al-Bayān Suleimān al-Isrāʾīlī; 1161–after 1236), Karaite physician in Cairo. He was a pupil of and secretary to Ḥibat Allāh ibn Jumayʿ (or Jamīʿ), a Jewish convert to Islam, and personal physician to the sultan Saladin. David served as physician to the sultan al-Malik al-ʿAdil. He also served on the medical faculty of the Nāṣirī hospital in Cairo. Here he had among his students Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa, the author of the classical history of Arab physicians, who speaks of him in the highest terms as an outstanding diagnostician and the rapeutist. David wrote Al-Dustūr al-Bīmāristānī fī al-Adwiya al-Murakkaba (ed. by P. Sbath, Cairo, 1933), a formulary of compound medicines for hospital use, and Risālat al-Mujarrabāt, a tract on well-tested medicines. Prescriptions by David are frequently quoted in the standard pharmacopoeia (entitled Minhāj al-Dukkān) of the 13th-century Jewish apothecary Abū al-Minā al-Kūhīn al-ʿAṭṭār. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Steinschneider, Arab Lit, 195f.; Brockelmann, Arab Lit, 1 (1898), 491, and Supplement 1 (1937), 896. (Leon Nemoy)