Moses Maimonides: leven en werk van een schitterend arts en filosoof

Moses Maimonides (1135 - 1204): life and work of a wonderful physician and philosopher Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides was probably born in 1135 in Cordoba. Being the son of a rabbi and judge he received an excellent education, mainly in the school of Lucena. The permanent changes in the Islamic world in Andalusia and the persecutions of the Jews made him emigrate to Fez in Morocco. At Al-Karaouine, one of the oldest universities of the world, he received a medical education by Avenzoar (1091-1161). Avenzoar was the first performer of tracheotomy and found the real origin of scabies. During his stay in Fez Maimonides also started his philosophical work. However, he again had to emigrate, this time he travelled to Acre. During a short stay there he visited Jerusalem in the Latin State. Maimonides continued his peregrination to Fustat in Egypt. There he became the wise man in Jewry. He was even the physician of the powerful Saladin himself. During the same period he wrote important medical books, covering the whole of medicine and emphasising beneficence in medical ethics. Maimonides died in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, next to the Sea of Galilea as he requested. His medical works are well preserved and give a careful insight in the medical knowledge of the medieval Islamic period. They contain an integration of the medical science of the Classical period into the Judeo-Arabic world. Maimonides’ philosophical and rabbinical writings are universal and still studied today. His holistic vision and interest in the psychosomatic medicine make him a universal scientist.

Psychedelic Therapy

This chapter, which is an ethnography of a psychosomatic department in a German hospital, functions as a foil to the rest of the volume. It allows us to ask the following: Why is the movement for global mental health preoccupied with the Global South? Why does mental health in the Global South primarily revolve around the psycho-pharmaceutical, while psychosomatic medicine, which in the German context is a separate discipline divorced from psychiatry, is normatively built on eschewing psycho-pharmaceuticals? Why is mental health in the Global South built on the distinction between superstition (past lives, trance, possession – in short, ‘rituals’ invoking the spirits and the dead) and science (psychiatry, rational diagnosis, asylums, drugs), while in Germany the two are often fused?