Ibn al-Nafis

Who is Ibn al-Nafis?

Ibn al-Nafis was an Arab physician and polymath born in Damascus who became one of the most important medical scholars of the medieval Islamic world. He trained at the renowned Nuri Hospital in Damascus before moving to Cairo, where he eventually served as chief physician at the Al-Mansuri Hospital and as personal physician to the Egyptian sultan. His most celebrated achievement is his description of the pulmonary (lesser) circulation of blood, in which he correctly argued, in his commentary on Ibn Sina's (Avicenna) Canon of Medicine, that blood passes from the right chamber of the heart to the left through the lungs rather than through invisible pores in the septum, as Galen had long claimed. This discovery predated the similar findings of European anatomists such as Michael Servetus and William Harvey by several centuries, though his work only became widely known to Western scholarship in the twentieth century. Beyond anatomy, he wrote extensively on ophthalmology, law, and Islamic theology, and produced a multi-volume medical encyclopedia. He died in Cairo in 1288, leaving behind one of the most significant bodies of medical scholarship of the pre-modern era.

Sources: Ibn al-Nafis, Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon (Sharh Tashrih al-Qanun) · S.I. Haddad and A.A. Khairallah, "A Forgotten Chapter in the History of the Circulation of the Blood", Annals of Surgery (1936) · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ibn al-Nafis"