(1213-1288 A.D.)

Ala al-Din Abu al-Hassan Ali ibn Abi-Hazm al-Qurashi al-Dimashqi (Arabic: علاء الدين أبو الحسن عليّ بن أبي حزم القرشي الدمشقي‎) (1213 CE – 1288 CE / 687 AH), commonly known as Ibn al-Nafis (Arabic : ابن النفيس‎), was an Arab Muslim polymath—a physician, anatomist, physiologist, surgeon, ophthalmologist, Hafiz, Hadith scholar, Shafi`i jurist and lawyer, Sunni theologian, Islamic philosopher, logician, novelist, psychologist, sociologist, scientist, science fiction writer, astronomer, cosmologist, futurist, geologist, grammarian, linguist and historian—who was born in Damascus, Syria, and worked in Cairo, Egypt.

Ibn al-Nafis is now most famous for being the first physician to describe the pulmonary transit of blood. His discovery disproved the 1000 year-old theory of Galen who suggested invisible pores in the intraventricular septum. Ibn Nafis clearly stated that the "blood in the right ventricle of the heart must reach the left ventricule by way of the lungs alone and not through a passage connecting the ventricle, as Galen maintained." In addition, he is credited with early insight into capillary and coronary circulation, which form the basis of thecirculatory system, for which he is has been called the father of circulatory physiology, and "the greatest physiologist of the Middle Ages." However, while his discovery of pulmonary circulation is undeniable, this is not equivalent to a theory of the entire circulatory system i.e. the continuous circular motion of the blood thoughout the whole body as proposed by William Harvey. He was also an early proponent of experimental medicine, postmortem autopsy, and human dissection, first described the concept of metabolism, and developed his own new Nafisian systems of anatomy, physiology, psychology and pulsology to replace the Avicennian and Galenicdoctrines, while discrediting many of their erroneous theories, pulsation, bones, muscles, intestines, sensory organs, bilious canals, esophagus, stomach, and the anatomy of almost every other part of the human body. Ibn al-Nafis also drew diagrams to illustrate different body parts in his new physiological system.

Besides his medical contributions, he wrote works on the Islamic religious disciplines, notably A Short Account of the Methodology of Hadith, which introduces a more rational and logical classification for the science of hadith. He also wrote works on fictional Arabic literature, notably the Arabic theological novel Theologus Autodidactus, a novel which features a feral child, Desert Island, early science fiction elements, and a coming of age plot, through which he expressed many of his religious, philosophical and scientific themes on a wide variety of subjects. Both of these works were mainly an attempt by Ibn al-Nafis at reconciling reason with revelation, both by highlighting the rationality of Islamic beliefs and by promoting the use of reason in the science of hadith.

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