fl. 900s

Nestorian physician, known in Europe as Serapion of Alexandria, who authored On Simple Medicines, a compendium that illustrated botanical cures and other medicinal practices. Serapion, a Christian who wrote in Syriac, worked among a group of Christian and Islamic scholars who translated classical Greek medical works into Arabic and Syriac, giving impetus to the rise of learned Islamic medicine in the tenth through twelfth centuries. Later, in the fifteenth century, On Simple Medicines was translated into Latin, along with other Arabic medical texts, providing a framework for the development of Western medicine in the late Middle Ages.