Music and Medicine from East to West

This research wants to highlight how important and advanced was the eastern world compared too the western civilization. My attention will focus on the philosophical field, but in the Muslim area, philosophy includes a large variety of subjects, and among them medicine and music. Medicine in the Islamic world also was "pluralistic", with various practices serving different needs and sometimes intermingling". Thus, I am going to examine how hospitals in Baghdad (705), in Fes (in the early 8th century), in Cairo (800), in Damascus and Aleppo (1270)  were organized, each one having its mental health department, in which psychiatric patients were cured by establishing a solid relationship with their doctors, whose firts purpose was to talk to them and consider them as human beings and not broken machines (Israel). It was applied, in fact, for the first time in history, the actual and very satisfying practice of music therapy. Then, throughout the evalutation of music from Plato to Aristotele, and well known Arab philosophers, I will analyze the link between medicine and psychology in Medieval Islam, and compare the techniques applied at that time to the methods used nowadays in western psychiatric hospitals. When talking about music within Islamic context, of course, it is necessary to examine its value, its origins, the instruments used, and how it is judged according to religious principles.
 
Maria Rosaria D'Acierno is professor of English and English Linguistics at the University of Naples Parthenope. She started as a researcher at Università L'Orientale with publications in particular on bilingualism and multilingualism/multiculturalism. Sha has studied abroad and as a speaker has partecipated in many international conferences. Sha has been a member and a research at the Mental Health Department of Scuola Antropologico-Trasformazionale held by Prof. Sergio Piro and has completed the five year psychotherapist course at the Mental Health Hospital "Frullone" in Naples. She has a three year master degree in Clinical Pedagogy attended in Florence. She graduated at Università L'Orientale in "lingue e Letterature Straniere" (Inglese, Tedesco e Francese), "Filosofia" (Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia), and "Arabo e Urdu" (Facoltà di Studi Islamici). She has publications in the filed of linguistics in various areas from the analysis of political language, to that of advertisements, poetry, literary language and many other subjects. She is now considering the linguistic and socio-cultural problems related to immigrant people. With "Irfan Edizioni" she has published Contrastive Analysis and Translation: Arabic, Italian, English (2011).