Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In this intellectual tour de force, which
was already admired by his contempo-
raries, Ibn al-Nafīs set out to show, by
abstract reasoning which he put into the
mouth of a solitary person, called Kāmil,
on a desert island, that the events in the
life of the Prophet and in the history of
the community of Muslims, including the
incursion of the Mongols in his own life-
time and even the physical appearance of
the Muslim ruler, no doubt sultan Bay-
bars, were the best things that could pos-
sibly have happened and therefore, under
divine providence, unavoidable. He ends
with a naturalistic explanation of the Last
Things.
The most important achievement of
Ibn al-Nafīs in the field of medicine is his
theory of the lesser or pulmonary circula-
tion of the blood, from the right ventricle
of the heart through the pulmonary artery
( vena arteriosa ) to the lung and from there
through the pulmonary vein ( arteria venosa )
to the left ventricle of the heart, boldly
contradicting the accepted ideas of Galen
and of Ibn Sīnā and anticipating part of
William Harvey's fundamental discov-
ery; in contrast with Harvey, who started
from experiment, Ibn al-Nafīs derived his
theory from the same kind of abstract
reasoning as in the Theologus Autodidactus .
This remarkable theory, perhaps because
of its unorthodox character, was almost
completely ignored by the later Arab
medical authors, excepting only an ano-
nymous commentator of the ānūn who
agrees with it, and an otherwise unknown
al-Fāil Ba dādī in his commentary on
the ānūn ¡ a , an extract from the ānūn
by Mamūd b. Muammad al-Ča mīnī
(d. 745/1344), who made it his object to
refute Ibn al-Nafīs's criticisms of Ibn Sīnā.
A theory of the lesser circulation, identical
in all essential respects with that of Ibn
al-Nafīs and expressed in terms strangely
reminiscent of those used by him, was
formulated by Michael Servetus in his
Christianismi restitutio (Vienna 1553), and
an exposition of the same doctrine by
Realdus Columbus (Realdo Colombo) in
his De re anatomica libri XV (Venice 1559)
forms a close parallel to this. Detailed
philological analysis has made it probable
that Servetus (and perhaps Colombo,
too) had direct knowledge of the theory
of Ibn al-Nafīs, and it is likely that this
knowledge was transmitted by Andrea
Alpago, who spent more than 30 years in
Syria, travelled widely in search of Arabic
manuscripts, and is known to have trans-
lated from the Arabic numerous medical
texts not all of which were printed post-
humously (he died about 1520).
(Max Meyerhof [ J. Schacht*])
3. A Miscellany of
Medicinals
Endive (Ar. Hindibā)
Cichorium endivia , the cultivated form
of a species of the ligulate chicory fam-
ily. Through Syriac anūbiyā , both terms
hindibā and “endive” go back to Greek
ἲντυβος , which is recorded only sporadi-
cally; normally the plant is called σέρις ,
in the Arabic translations sāris or sarīs.
The nomenclature, rich and confused,
can be summarised as follows: the wild
endive ( hindibā barrī ) was already known
to the earlier Arab botanists under vari-
ous names: ala º or ala º , further yaīd,
bala murra, ar a ª ū and variants. As
indicated by the last but one name, it is
a “bitter vegetable” and is therefore also
called amarūn (and variants). The latter
term is not of Greek origin, as the topics
on medicine have it, but is to be derived
from Latin amarum . The cultivated endive,
usually called hindibā , is the popular, tasty
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