AVENZOAR (ABU MERWAN ABDALMALEC BEN ZOHR), an eminent Arabian physician, who flourished about the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. He was of noble descent, and born at Seville, the capital of Andalusia, where he exercised his profession with great reputation. He was contemporary with Averroes, who, according to Leo Africanus, heard his lectures and learned physic of him. This seems the more probable, because Averroes more than once gives Avenzoar very high and deserved praise, calling him admirable, glorious, the treasure of all knowledge, and the most supreme in physic from the time of Galen to his own. Avenzoar, notwithstanding, is by the generality of writers reckoned an empiric; but Dr Freind observes that this character suits him less than any of the rest of the Arabians. Avenzoar belonged, in fact, to the Dogmatists or Rational Sect, the antipodes of the Empirics. He was a great admirer of Galen; and in his writings inveighs against the quackery of old women, and the superstitious remedies of the astrologers. He shows no inconsiderable knowledge of anatomy in his remarkable description of inflammation and abscess of the mediastinum in his own person, and its diagnosis from common pleuritis as well as from abscess and dropsy of the pericardium. In cases of obstruction or of palsy of the gullet, his three modes of treatment are ingenious. He proposes to support the strength by placing the patient in a tepid bath of nutritious liquids, that might enter by cutaneous imbibition; but does not recommend this. He speaks more favourably of the introduction of food into the stomach by a silver tube; and he strongly recommends the use of nutritive enemata. From his writings it would appear that the offices of physician, surgeon, and apothecary were already considered as distinct professions. He wrote a book entitled The Method of Preparing Medicines and Diet, which was translated into Hebrew in the year 1280, and thence into Latin by Paravicinus, whose version has passed through several editions.