Prophetic medicine

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In Islam, prophetic medicine (Arabic: الطب النبوي, 'al-Tibb al-nabawī) is the advice regarding sickness, treatment and hygiene based on reports of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as found in the hadith. The therapy involves diet, bloodletting, and cautery, and simple drugs (especially honey), numerous prayers and pious invocations for the patient to perform, but no surgery.^[1] Maladies discussed include fevers, plague, leprosy, poisonous bites, protection from night-flying insects and the evil eye, rules for coitus, theories of embryology, etc. The authors of its manuals were religious clerics who collected and explicated these traditions, not physicians, and it is usually practiced by non-physicians.^[1][2] How much of the medicine is divine revelation and how much folk practices inherited from ancestors (and thus time-sensitive, culturally situated, rather than eternal medical truths) is disputed.^[3][4] (There is also a non-hadith based traditional medicine of early Arabs, known as Unani medicine.)^[5]

Prophetic medicine is distinct from Islamic medicine, which is a broader category encompassing a variety of medical practices rooted in Greek natural philosophy, (which are distinct from hadith-based Prophetic medicine).^[1] This body of knowledge was fully articulated only in the 14th century, at which point it was concerned with reconciling Sunnah (traditions) with the foundations of the Galenic humoral theory that was prevalent at the time in the medical institutions of the Islamicate world.^[6] It is nonetheless a tradition with continued modern relevance to this day,^[7][8] when it is said to be "gaining popularity as a reflection" of Muslims' love of their Prophet.^[9]