Science & Islam by Ehsan Masood

Author:Ehsan Masood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Science
Publisher: Icon Books
Published: 2009-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Doctor of the heart

Ibn al-Nafis was born in Damascus in 1213 but subsequently moved to Cairo, which by then had some of the most advanced hospitals in the Islamic world, including the al-Mansuri where ibn al-Nafis became head physician. He wrote a medical book which is believed to have made him very rich, and which replaced ibn-Sina’s Canon as the standard medical text in the Islamic world, though it had less impact in Europe. More significantly, he wrote commentaries on the work of Galen and ibn-Sina, correcting what he saw as some of their mistakes, for example on the pulse. But his real fame among historians in the West stems from a discovery made in 1924 that had some scholars rewriting medical history.

In 1924, a manuscript from ibn al-Nafis’ Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna’s Canon, dating from 1242, was discovered in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. Galen (and later ibn-Sina) believed that blood seeped through from one side of the heart to the other through little holes in the septum that divided the sides. On examining many hearts, both alone and with witnesses, ibn al-Nafis could find no signs of such holes at all. He asserted instead that blood in the right ventricle of the heart must reach the left ventricle through the lungs alone, and not through small passages as Galen had maintained. Ibn al-Nafis had discovered what today we call pulmonary transit, or the lesser circulation.

Some writers and historians believe that ibn al-Nafis had in fact discovered the circulation of the blood. Others, such as medical historians Emilie Savage-Smith of Oxford University and Peter Pormann of Warwick University, say that discovering pulmonary transit is not quite the same thing as demonstrating the continuous circulation of blood, which William Harvey did in 1628. This could be because ibn al-Nafis’s description was uni-directional – it did not include the notion that blood returns from the left venticle to the right ventricle.

Ibn al-Nafis was, in many ways, part of the last generation of groundbreaking medical scientists in medieval Islam.

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