Unani medicine
traditional medicine from the Mughal empire
Unani medicine or Unani Tibb (Urdu: طب یونانی tibb-i-yūnānī) is a Greco-Arabic traditional medicine system practiced in areas of South Asia and Central Asia. Unani medicine uses the humoral theory of diagnosis, which predates the discovery of microbes and modern medicine. Unani medicine and these theories are regarded as pseudoscientific.
The term Yūnānī means 'Greek', referring to the fact that the Greco-Arabic system of medicine was based on the teachings of the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen.
The Hellenistic origin of Unani medicine is still visible in its being based on the classical four humours: phlegm (balgham), blood (dam), yellow bile (ṣafrā) and black bile (saudā), but it has also been influenced by Indian and Chinese traditional systems.
Etymology
The term Unani dates back to the ancient Greek place-name Ἰωνία (Iōnía), a coastal region on the eastern Aegean. The Ionians were the major ethnic group of the region, and their name became the primary Arabic and Persian reference for Greece as a civilization, known as Yūnānistan.
History
Ancient Greece (1200 BC – 600 AD)
Unani medicine established its foundations in ancient Greece. Hippocrates (c. 460–380 BCE) constructed the four-humor framework (blood (dam), phlegm (balg), yellow bile (safra), and black bile (sawda)), attributing the cause of disease to an imbalance of internal humoral and bodily composition.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Unani medicine” is traditional medicine from the Mughal empire. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Unani, medicine and traditional, not as a finished interpretation.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1520176. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1200.
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This entry incorporates text from “Unani medicine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.