Learning medicine and working as a physician

This lesson asks you to identify and describe careers related to the science you study, and the education and training they need. The museum can show one case only: how a physician of the thirteenth century learned and then worked. Your class must bring today's careers in biology and their training from elsewhere. ¹

Read each record and sort what it says into learning (teachers, places of study) and working (posts, duties). Then ask which of these you would expect to find in a science career today.

Read the two events side by side as a record of one career. Ibn al-Nafis studied medicine under shaykh Muhadhdhib al-Din al-Dakhwar, Damascus's shaykh of medicine, and excelled in the craft and in treatment ². Later, headship of medicine in Egypt came to rest with him: he was made Chief Physician of Egypt and personal physician of sultan Baybars ^{2 3}. He also lectured on Shafi'i law at the Masruriyya madrasa, where the grammarian Abu Hayyan al-Gharnati was his disciple in logic ³. The two records are his study under al-Dakhwar and his post under Baybars. Sort each fact into learning (a teacher, a place of study) or working (a post, a duty).

The records give no statement by Ibn al-Nafis of why he entered medicine. What they show is where he worked and what he gave. West says that he worked first at the Nasiri hospital in Cairo and then at the Mansuri hospital, becoming its chief physician ⁴. He also wrote outside medicine, on law, theology, philosophy and astronomy ⁴. The biographical entry says he endowed his properties and his books to the Mansuri hospital ⁵.

Dates in these records are bounds, not days. Al-Dakhwar died in 628/1230, so the apprenticeship predates that year ^{3 6}; the record gives no more exact date for the study. The appointment is placed only within Baybars's reign of 658–676/1260–1277 ³. On his birth year the pulmonary-circulation record says the sources differ: West gives 1213, while the Arabic biographies used by the museum put it a few years earlier ⁴. Ask what a historian can safely say when the sources give different anchors.

For his training, the records give a teacher and an end date, before 628/1230 ³. For his work, they give posts within a reign ³. Take a position and answer the strongest objection to it: for a science career, which do these records show better, the training or the work, and why?

• Ibn al-Nafis studies under al-Dakhwar: the teacher, and why the date is only a bound.
• Ibn al-Nafis becomes Chief Physician of Egypt: the post, the sultan and the teaching.
• Ibn al-Nafis: the biographical entry on his book and his endowment.
• The pulmonary circulation: the account of the blood's route through the lungs in his commentary, and the sources on his life.

Make a two-column table for Ibn al-Nafis, learning and working, from the three cards of this lesson. Then make the same table for a career in biology that you choose.