Maṣāliḥ al-Insān al-Mutaʿalliqat bi al-Adyānwa al-Abdān, The human being interests linked to the religions and the body
The ‘Maṣāliḥ al-Insān al-Mutaʿalliqat bi al-Adyānwa al-Abdān, The human being interests linked to the religions and the body’ is a book written by Abdullah Dan Fodio (1766 – 1829) and divided into two parts. The first parts deals with the rights granted by muslim law to the human being from conception to death (the choice of the mother, during the union for marriage, baptism, circumcision, and pre-school education, marriage, etc.). In the second, devoted to medicine, the author states that it derives from two main sources which are the revelation (the Qu’ran and the Hadiths) and the experimentation. In the latter, it refers to the influence of environmental factors on health. His vision of medicine is based on the theory of humours whih considers that the body is composed of four basic elements&column; air, fire, water and earth with four qualities, namely, hot or cold, dry or wet. The disease is caused by the imbalance between these elements. At the end of this chapter, it also refers to the ethics of medical practice, such as the confidentiality of patients, the treatment of patients with kindness and hospitality, not practice medicine for profit but only for a genuine concern to help abandoned, etc.
