education of
any kind among them except that at the end of the sixth century, the
Persian King Chosroes I, who was much interested in medicine, encouraged
the medical school in Djondisabour, in Arabistan, founded at the end of
the fifth century by the Nestorian Christians, who continued as the
teachers there until it became one of the most important schools of the
East. It was here that the first Arab physicians were trained, and here
that the Christian physicians who practised medicine among the Arabs
were educated.

Among the Arabs themselves, before the time of Mohammed, there had been
very little interest in medicine. Gurlt notes that even the physician of
the Prophet himself was, according to tradition, a Christian.
Mohammed's immediate successors were not interested in education, and
their people mainly turned to Christian and Jewish physicians for
whatever medical treatment they needed. When the Caliphs came to be
rulers of the Mohammedan Empire, they took special pains to encourage
the study of philosophy and medicine; though dissection was forbidden by
the Koran, most of the other medical sciences, and especially botany and
all the therapeutic arts, were seriously cultivated.

Until the coming of Mohammed, the Arabs had been wandering tribes,
getting some fame as hireling soldiers, but now, under the influence of
a feeling of community in religion, and led by the military genius of
some of Mohammed's successors, whose soldiers were inspired by the
religious feelings of the sect, they made great conquests. The
Mohammedan Empire extended from India to Spain within a century after
Mohammed's death. Carthage was taken and destroyed, Constantinople was
threatened. In 661, scarcely forty years after the _hegira_ or flight of
Mohammed, from which good Mohammedans date their era, the capital was
transferred from Medina to Damascus, to be transferred from here to
Bagdad just about a century later, where it remained until the Mongols
made an end of the Abbasside rulers about the middle of the thirteenth
century. At the beginning the followers of Mohammed were opposed to
knowledge and education of all kinds. Mohammed himself had but little.
According to tradition, he could not read or write. The story told with
regard to the Caliph Omar and the great library of Alexandria, seems to
have a foundation in reality, though such legends usually are not to be
taken literally. Certainly it represents the traditional view as to