‘Abd al-Latif in the first part of his above mentioned autobiographical work (Joosse 2011, 2014) focuses on the epistemological status of the art of medicine using different comparisons which seem to be in contradiction: medicine is like both mathematics and the art of archery (Joosse &amp; Pormann 2008). Medicine is an art concerned with universals. For this reason it does not make errors. Mathematics is also a science which considers abstract concepts, but even in this theoretical science approximation occurs (the examples are that of the impossibility of squaring a circle and the approximation in writing an irrational number). Concerning the physicians, they are like the expert in the art of archery “who hits the mark in most cases” (Joosse 2014: 66), but they can make mistakes because they are concerned with particulars. Good physicians, even if they do not hit the target, do not miss it entirely. For ‘Abd al-Latif his contemporaries are like those whose arrows which do not hit the targets, but on the contrary, fall in the opposite direction (Joosse &amp; Pormann 2010).