Razi — the Persian doctor who doubted Galen | PERSIA'S GREATEST MINDS Part 4

History Onion · Part 4 Al-Razi · 2:58

For seven hundred years, doctors from Constantinople to Baghdad learned medicine above all from Galen. Around the year 900, a Persian physician named Zakariya Razi wrote a book with a blunt title: Doubts About Galen. He ran hospitals in Rey and Baghdad, and the patients in his wards showed him what the books were missing. Smallpox was everywhere, yet Galen had only mentioned it in passing — and when Razi asked scholars who read Greek and Syriac whether Galen had said more, not one of them could add anything. So he wrote the missing book himself: a Treatise on Smallpox and Measles that told the two diseases apart. Pain in the back pointed to smallpox; restlessness, nausea and anxiety pointed to measles. He tested his own treatments too. Treating patients with the first signs of brain fever, he bled one group and deliberately left another untreated, "to remove the doubt from my opinion." Bloodletting is long abandoned; the deliberate comparison is what lasted. His books reached Latin in 12th-century Toledo. In 1537 Andreas Vesalius — who would go on to correct Galen's anatomy — published his very first book: a commentary on Razi. A vaccine institute in Iran founded in 1925 carries his name, and among the vaccines it has made is one against measles.