Ibn al-Nafis

ʿAla al-Din ʿAli ibn Abi al-Hazm, known as Ibn al-Nafis, was the shaykh of medicine in Egypt, the one to whom knowledge of medicine ultimately led. He also took part in jurisprudence, the principles of law, hadith, Arabic and logic. Al-Subki said, "There was no one like him on the face of the earth in medicine." It was also said that after Ibn Sina no one like him had come, and that he was greater than him in treatment ¹.

He wrote the medical book "al-Shamil," whose index suggests that it would run to three hundred volumes. He left eighty volumes of it unfinished. He dictated his works from memory and did not need to consult sources, because of his mastery of the field. He died on the twenty-first of Dhu al-Qaʿda 687 AH, when he was nearly eighty. He endowed his properties and his books to the Mansuri hospital, and no one like him was left ².

From Ibn al-ʿImad's Shadharat al-Dhahab, the biographies of 687 AH: a readable text produced by the scanning process named in the Arabic source ("Abel Vigen"), whose passages were checked and whose entries were selected for the museum.

Tareq al-Suwaidan presents Ibn al-Nafis as the model of 'working in what one loves' — a secret of creativity — citing al-Shafi'i's 'the noblest religious science is fiqh and the noblest worldly science is medicine' ^{3 4}. Of his life: raised in Homs studying fiqh, hadith and language to his teachers' high praise, a severe health crisis in 629 AH at twenty-two — fevers his physicians mistreated — turned him against those doctors and set him on medicine to benefit people; his father objected, medicine being foreign to Homs' scholarly society, but he convinced him and enrolled in Damascus' Nuri hospital, studying under Muhdhab al-Din Abd al-Rahim and Imran al-Isra'ili ^{5 6 7 8 9}. He went down to Cairo in 633 AH joining the Nasiri hospital, becoming its head and professor in its medical school, then moved to Qalawun's hospital and became al-Zahir Baybars' personal physician ^{10 11 12}. The epidemic: when plague swept Egypt killing thousands, Ibn al-Nafis formed a medical team with precise instructions that spread through Egypt fighting the outbreak until he controlled it — the Egyptians named him 'Ibn al-Nafis the Egyptian', showered him with gifts, and his salon drew scholars, notables and students of medicine and fiqh alike ^{13 14 15 16}. Of his medical achievements: the discovery of the lesser circulation in his commentary on the anatomy of Ibn Sina's Canon, some three hundred years before Harvey — he notes Muhyi al-Din al-Tatawi established the truth in his treatises — with some crediting him also the greater circulation; he refuted Galen and Ibn Sina; was the first to prescribe salt moderation showing its effect on blood pressure; described the larynx, respiratory system and arteries and their functions; and discovered that the heart's muscles are nourished by vessels embedded in it, not by the blood in its cavity ^{17 18 19 20 21}. His encyclopaedia al-Shamil fi al-Sina'a al-Tibbiyya: he drafted it in three hundred volumes and completed eighty — the sum of Muslim medical labour and the world's reference for five centuries ^{22 23}. Of his other works: a commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, al-Mujiz fi al-Tibb, al-Risala al-Kamila on the Prophet ﷺ's life, a compendium on hadith principles, a treatise on logic, and Fadil ibn Natiq answering Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqzan ^{20 24 25}. Of his sides: a Shafi'i jurist singled out by al-Subki in his Tabaqat, and a grammarian whose word alone Ibn al-Nahhas accepted in Cairo ^{26 27}. On his deathbed — past eighty, after six days' illness — he pushed away the wine offered him, saying 'I will not meet God with wine in my belly', and died at dawn on Friday 21 Dhu al-Qa'da 687 AH ^{28 29}. He closes with counsel to parents: never force your children into fields they do not love, for they will never create — and his rule of fifty percent of time, reading and output for one's main field ^{29 30 31}.