Biology

Biology

Published 2002

Hunayn Ibn Ishaq systematized and defined the life sciences and devised practical concepts and procedures for study, experimentation, and practice. He wrote al-Masa’il fi at-tibb, Introduction to Healing Art. As a result, the medical and pharmaceutical branches of science developed further.

Introduction to Healing Art to approve physicians’ licenses from the 8th to the 14th century. The book was translated into Latin and was widely used in Europe. Hunayn then wrote Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) and ten treaties on anatomy, physiology, and eye treatment. These treaties became the first systematic and organized Arabic texts on the earliest known anatomical charts.

Muslim surgeons were among the first to use narcotic and sedative drugs in operations. Islam teaches that God has provided human beings with various natural remedies to cure the ills. It is man’s obligation to identify them and to use them with skill and compassion.

Al Majusi (died 994) is considered the first theorist on anatomy and physiology in Arabic medicine. His Liber Regius was the first Islamic work to deal with surgery in detail, and he was the first to use the tourniquet to prevent arterial bleeding.

Ibn al-Haytham, in his book Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics), drew a diagram of the Eyes and related nerves in the 11th century.

Al-Zahrawi of Moorish Spain (940-1013) wrote an encyclopedia, at-Tasrif, covering obstetrics, pediatrics, and midwifery, as well as general human anatomy. His later treatises focused on surgery, including cautery.

Ibn an-Nafis (1210-1288) gave the most comprehensive description of surgical operations and the treatment of bodily injuries in any Arabic text of its kind. He explained the capillaries’ function, the minute blood passages that connect arteries and veins, and the action of cordial valves in the veins and the heart chambers. We also owe him the first appeal for uniformity in the standards of weights and measures used in medicine, pharmacy, and surgery.

Ibn al-Nafis also studied the lungs’ anatomy and was the first known to describe the coronary circulation, the vessels that supply blood to the heart itself. “The nourishment of the heart is from the blood that goes through the vessels that permeate the body of the heart.”

Ibn al-Nafis’s work was based on extensive anatomical study. Still, the significance of his ideas was not really understood even in his own country and was probably unknown by physicians in western countries. About 300 years after his original writings, Andrea Alpago of Belluno translated some of Ibn al-Nafis’s work into Latin in 1547. His important observations then became available in Europe shortly before some European scientists and doctors made similar discoveries.

Whether by coincidence or not, his work was not brought to light again until the 20th century, when people became aware of how early he had reached his conclusions about the workings of the heart and that some “borrowing” of ideas may have occurred.