Ala al-Din Ali ibn Abi al-Hazm al-Qurashi, known as Ibn al-Nafis, was born in 1213 in Damascus, and studied medicine at the city's renowned Nuri Bimaristan, one of the most advanced teaching hospitals in the Islamic world at the time. He later moved to Cairo, where he served as chief physician at the Mansuri Bimaristan, one of the largest hospitals of the medieval era.
In his medical commentary on Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine, Ibn al-Nafis dared to challenge the theory of the Greek physician Galen, which had dominated medicine for over a thousand years, holding that blood passed from the heart's right ventricle to the left through invisible pores in the septum separating them. Ibn al-Nafis demonstrated through anatomical reasoning that this septum was entirely solid, and that blood instead followed another path: from the right ventricle to the lungs, where it mixed with air and was purified, then returned to the heart's left side via the pulmonary vein.
A Discovery Centuries Ahead of Its Time
Ibn al-Nafis's precise description of pulmonary circulation remained unknown in Europe for centuries, until researchers later discovered his manuscripts and established his priority over European scientists who described the same phenomenon in the 16th century, such as Michael Servetus and Realdo Colombo, by more than three hundred years. His discovery is regarded today as one of the landmark achievements in the history of physiology, and an example of independent scientific reasoning that moved beyond the traditional authority of ancient texts.
