Physicians: training and contributions

This lesson asks you to identify careers in the science you study, to describe the education and training they need, and to describe what scientists have contributed to the field. The museum offers one career, the physician, and the contributions of two physicians as its records present them. Canadian scientists and today's routes into the profession are for your class to bring. ¹

Look for the steps a person went through before being allowed to practise. List them in order, then set them beside the steps in your own province. Note what is the same and what differs.

For each of the two scientists, write one sentence on what the record says was added, and one on what the record says was already known before. A contribution is the difference between the two.

Read one text in the record on pulmonary circulation. The account rests on two passages of the commentary, which West quotes in Meyerhof's translation ². In the first, on folio 46 recto, Ibn al-Nafis writes that the blood, once refined in the right cavity, must pass to the left cavity, where the spirit is generated; but there is no passage between the two cavities, because "the substance of the heart is solid in this region and has neither a visible passage, as was thought by some persons, nor an invisible one which could have permitted the transmission of blood, as was alleged by Galen" ². In the second, on folio 65, he repeats that there is no passage at all between the ventricles, and says that the blood enters the left ventricle from the lung ².

West says that Ibn al-Nafis published the commentary at 29, and that he did not set out to write a book of his own: his aim was to explain Ibn Sina's anatomy; when he reached the heart, he departed from Ibn Sina and from Galen before him, and wrote that anatomy refutes those who claimed the septum was porous ³. For al-Razi's treatise, the author's preface describes discussion at the home of a man interested in useful learning, followed by a request for a connected, organized treatment of the disease ⁴. The record presents this as the text's account of its occasion, not an independent record, and finds its significance in the stated educational purpose: gathering dispersed knowledge into an accessible arrangement ⁴.

Did Servetus and those after him know Ibn al-Nafis's work? West's source says Servetus's words on the septum and the lungs resemble Ibn al-Nafis's, which might suggest he knew the earlier work ². On the other side, a 1940 study by Owsei Temkin pointed out inconsistencies between the two statements, and the 1547 Latin translation of the Commentary on Compound Drugs apparently said nothing about the pulmonary circulation ². West writes that many historians believe Servetus did not know Ibn al-Nafis's work; if so, both deserve credit for the discovery, each in his own time ².

It is easy to suppose that the whole old framework fell when Ibn al-Nafis denied the pores in the septum. West distinguishes three kinds of spirit in Galen's historical model, not accepted modern physiology, and the record says that rejecting those pores did not replace the entire framework with twenty-first-century physiology ⁵. As for al-Razi, TDV calls him the first to diagnose the two diseases correctly; this is Kaya's assessment, not an independent comparison of all earlier writings ⁶. Chapter III establishes that he did compare them, which supports documented improvement rather than absolute priority ⁷.

The record says the West then forgot the passage for centuries. In the twentieth century a young Egyptian physician, Muhyi al-Din al-Tatawi, came across the manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin while writing a doctoral thesis, submitted in 1924 and never published; Max Meyerhof learned of the discovery and translated the passages ². The source does not say that the account spread in Islamic medicine after Ibn al-Nafis ⁸. Even his birth year is disputed: West gives 1213, while the Arabic biographies used by the museum put it a few years earlier ³. Al-Razi's treatise is read in William Alexander Greenhill's English translation, printed in London in 1848, not an independently collated Arabic original, and Greenhill says the composition date is unknown ^{9 10}.

West's source says Servetus's words on the septum and the lungs resemble Ibn al-Nafis's, that a 1940 study by Temkin pointed out inconsistencies, and that the 1547 Latin translation apparently said nothing about the pulmonary circulation. Take a position on whether the museum should say that Servetus knew Ibn al-Nafis's work, and answer the strongest objection to it: is the resemblance of the two texts not enough to show a connection?

• Pulmonary circulation: the two passages from folios 46 and 65, and what was taught before them.
• Al-Razi on smallpox and measles: chapter III and its comparison of two descriptions, with the limits of what it shows.
• The physician: how physicians were trained and how permission to practise was given.
• Ibn al-Nafis: his life and works.
• Abu Bakr al-Razi: his biography, and the researchers' readings of his thought.

Open the record on pulmonary circulation and read its section on the world before it. Draw the path of the blood as that teaching described it, then redraw it as Ibn al-Nafis described it.