Medicine · a Light

Nobody knows whether Europe read Ibn al-Nafis on the heart

Writing in Cairo around 1242, Ibn al-Nafis said that the wall between the two sides of the heart is solid, that no blood seeps through it, and that blood must therefore travel from the right chamber out to the lungs, mix with air there, and return to the left. Three centuries later Michael Servetus in 1553 and Realdo Colombo in 1559 described the same route in Europe. Whether they knew of him is an open question. A Venetian physician, Andrea Alpago, had spent about thirty years in Damascus and translated Ibn al-Nafis into Latin, printed in Venice in the 1540s, so a channel existed. No European text of the period cites him, and independent rediscovery is entirely possible. Historians have argued both sides since an Egyptian doctor found the Arabic passage in a Berlin manuscript in 1924.

Ibn al-Nafis · Cairo, c. 1242