The patient, they said, had lost the will to live.
He could no longer eat. He did not sleep. When questioned, he gave only sighs. His heart beat like a trapped bird. The physician — a Hakim of some renown — laid a steady hand upon the boy’s wrist. After a few moments, he nodded.
“It is ‘Ishq.’ Love.”Once upon a time, love was not a metaphor. It was not a poetic exaggeration, nor a theme for films. It was a diagnosis. A disturbance of the soul, yes — but also of the body. Among the practitioners of Unani medicine, passionate, unrequited love was considered an affliction as real as fever or melancholy.
Today, we smuggle our heartbreaks into therapists’ offices, call them attachment disorders or co-dependence. But in the ancient clinic, a broken heart had a name. It had symptoms. It had a treatment plan.
The Canon of Medicine, compiled by Ibn Sina — known in the West as Avicenna — became a foundational text not only for Islamic medicine but for centuries of European physicians as well. In it, love appears not in allegory but in the case notes, described with clinical precision. “Love,” Ibn Sina wrote, “is a mental disease when it becomes excessive.”
He even prescribed a method for diagnosis:
“If you suspect a patient of love-sickness, take his pulse while mentioning the name of someone. If the pulse quickens, the illness is confirmed.”
This was not idle romanticism. Physicians observed the body for signs of longing just as they would for liver disease or a disturbed humor. In Unani medicine, rooted in the humoral theory of Hippocrates and Galen, every emotion had its seat in the body. Love was no exception — it could heat the blood, dry out the phlegm, and send black bile spiraling. It was both passion and pathology.
To be possessed by love was not just a poetic flourish; it was a disturbance of balance — a disruption of temperaments. The young, warm-blooded, melancholic types were most vulnerable. Women, too, were considered susceptible, especially in isolation — leading to another old diagnosis: uterine suffocation, thought to result from longings unmet.
Even pulse diagnosis, an art form in Unani, played a central role. A skilled Hakim could feel minute variations in rhythm and tension, interpreting them as signs of emotional distress. The body, after all, couldn’t lie.
The Medicine of Desire
So how did one treat this condition?
There was no one remedy. The treatment depended on the intensity of the love — and its prospects. If the beloved could be reached, then marriage was prescribed as the surest cure. If the beloved was unattainable, the treatment became more elaborate. Hakims might suggest distraction through travel, poetic recitations, or social gatherings. Others advised herbal tonics — Rauwolfia, Sandalwood, Ashwagandha — to cool the fire within. In severe cases, sedatives or isolation might be used.
Some texts even mention spiritual or moral therapies: the reading of philosophical texts, prayer, or self-discipline. The goal was always the same — not to extinguish love, but to return the patient to a state of balance.
Interestingly, Unani medicine did not view this love-sickness with contempt. It was an affliction, yes — but a noble one. It revealed a soul capable of depth, of intense feeling. That the heart could be broken was, in a way, proof that it was alive.
Echoes in Modern Rooms
Today, we rarely speak of love as a disease. We speak instead of obsessive tendencies, attachment trauma, or dopamine dysregulation. The language has changed; the pain has not.
Modern psychiatry is careful with emotion. While terms like limerence or erotomania exist, they describe the extremes — obsessive love that borders on delusion. But for the ordinary sufferer, the one who cannot sleep, who rereads messages, who loses their appetite in the shadow of absence — there is no diagnosis. Only a shrug, or a pill.
The DSM does not list ‘Ishq.’ But the ache endures.
What the Hakim Knew
What if the old physicians were right? Not about humors or uterine vapors, but about love’s capacity to disrupt the body? What if treating the symptoms without addressing the cause — the absence, the longing, the unmet gaze — is only half the medicine?
The Unani understanding of love was deeply human. It allowed heartbreak to be part of the clinic, to be named and treated with care. It did not trivialize it, nor did it over-pathologize. In that middle ground, something rare was offered: a recognition that suffering from love was not weakness, but a mark of being fully alive.
Postscript: In the Waiting Room of the Heart
And so, across time, we sit with the same complaints.
Sleeplessness. Weight loss. Staring into nothing. That flutter when a name is heard.
But the Hakim is long gone.
Now, we search online. Or take melatonin.
Or lie to ourselves. Or write poems.
Still, the diagnosis remains:
A deep ache, centered in the chest, made worse by memory.
Call it Ishq.
Call it love.
It was always incurable.