User:NightmarePhule/Medicine in the medieval Islamic world

Gynecological Theory
Infertility was viewed as an illness, one that could be cured if the proper steps were taken. Unlike the easement of pain, infertility was not an issue that relied on the patient's subjective feeling. A successful treatment for infertility could be observed with the delivery of a child. Therefore, this allowed the failures of unsuccessful methods for infertility treatment to be explained objectively by Arab medical experts.

The lack of a menstrual cycle in women was viewed as menstrual blood being "stuck" inside the woman and the method for release of this menstrual blood was for the woman to seek marriage or sexual intercourse with a male. Among both healthy and sick women, it was generally believed that sexual intercourse and giving birth to children were means of keeping women from getting sick. One of the conditions that lack of sexual intercourse was considered to lead to is uterine suffocation in which it was believed there was movement of the womb inside the woman's body and the cause of this movement was attributed to be from the womb's desire for semen.

There was consensus among Arabic medical scholars that an excess of heat, dryness, cold or moisture in the woman's uterus would lead to the death of the fetus. The Hippocratics believed more warmth in the woman leads to the woman having a "better" color and leads to the production of a male offspring while more coldness in the woman leads to her having an "uglier" color, leading to her producing a female offspring. Al-Razi is critical of this point of view, stating that it is possible for a woman to be cold when she becomes pregnant with a female fetus, then for that woman to improve her condition and become warm again, leading to the woman possessing warmth but still having a female fetus. Al-Razi concludes that masculinity and femininity are not dependent on warmth as many of his fellow scholars have proclaimed, but instead dependent on the availability of one type of seed.

Al-Tabari, inspired by Hippocrates, believes that miscarriage can be caused by physical or psychological experiences that causes a woman to behave in a way that causes the bumping of the embryo, sometimes leading to its death depending on what stage of pregnancy the woman is currently in. He believed that during the beginning stages of pregnancy, the fetus can be ejected very easily and is akin to an "unripe fruit". In later stages of pregnancy, the fetus is more similar to a "ripe fruit" where it is not easily ejected by simple environmental factors such as wind. Some of the physical and psychological factors that can lead a woman to miscarry are damage to the breast, severe shock, exhaustion, and diarrhea.

Treatments of Infertility
The treatment for infertility by Arab medical experts often depend on the type of conception theory they follow. The two-seed theory states that female sexual pleasure needs to be maximized in order to ensure the secretion of more seeds and thus maximize the chances of conception. Ibn Sina recommends that men need to try to enlarge their penises or to narrow the woman's vagina in order to increase the woman's sexual pleasure and thus increase the chance of producing an offspring. Another theory of conception, the "seed and soil" model, states that the sperm is the only gamete and the role of the woman's body is purely for nourishment of the embryo. Treatments used by followers of this method often include treating infertile women with substances that are similar to fertilizer. One example of such a treatment is the insertion of fig juice into the womb. The recipe for fig juice includes substances that have been used as agricultural fertilizer.