Like al-Khwarizmi, the physician and philosopher al-Razi (RAH-zee), better known in the West as Rhazes (RAHZ-ez), spent much of his career in the great Islamic cultural center of Baghdad. There he wrote a number of important works and established the medieval world's most advanced hospital. In selecting the location for the hospital, it was said that al-Razi had pieces of meat hung in various parts of the city, and picked the place where the meat was slowest to decompose, reasoning that the air was most healthful there. As a doctor he was noted for his compassion, caring for his patient's emotional wellbeing in addition to their physical bodies, and even helping to support them financially while they recovered at home.
Al-Razi's written works include a ten-volume encyclopedia of medicine as well as a book translated as Upon the Circumstances Which Turn the Head of Most Men from the Reputable Physician (c. 919). In it he addressed questions as vital to the medical practice today as they were eleven hundred years ago, warning doctors that patients think they know everything, and encouraging the physicians themselves not to fall under the sway of this mistaken belief. His most important work was The Comprehensive Book (c. 930), an encyclopedia in twenty-four volumes that summed up the medical knowledge of his time.
Like many doctors in the premodern period, al-Razi accepted the ancient Greeks' idea that drawing blood would help a patient recover.
Al-Razi. Reproduced by permission of the Granger Collection Ltd.
He did, however, urge caution in doing so, and warned physicians not to apply the technique on the very old, the very young, or the very sick.
He applied a variety of herbs and medicines, the uses of which he said he had learned primarily from female healers around the Muslim world.
As both a doctor and a philosopher, al-Razi was interested in alchemy, which was based on the idea that ordinary metals can be turned into precious metals such as gold. Although alchemy was not a real science, it influenced the development of chemistry. Al-Razi's experiments in alchemy may have contributed to his later blindness, and when he died he was in poverty, having given all his wealth to the care of his patients. But
He is remembered with great honor: in its School of Medicine, the University of Paris—one of the first institutions of higher education established in the Middle Ages—included the portraits of just two Muslim physicians, al-Razi and Avicenna.
World History
