Ibn al-Nafis

Ala al-Din Ali ibn Abi al-Hazm al-Qarshi, known as Ibn al-Nafis, was a physician, jurist, and polymath active in Ayyubid and early Mamluk Syria and Egypt. He was born around 1210-1213 CE (c. 607 AH); sources place his birth in or near Damascus, though his name al-Qarshi is variously explained as a tribal nisba (descent from Quraysh) or as a reference to a locality, and the two readings are not settled. He studied medicine at the Nuri Bimaristan (a teaching hospital) in Damascus, where his teachers reportedly included the renowned physician al-Dakhwar (d. 1230).

Ibn al-Nafis later moved to Egypt, where tradition records that he worked at the Nasiri hospital in Cairo and eventually held the post of "chief of physicians." His later career is well attested even where particular details — such as exactly which Cairo hospital he taught in — are described by historians as uncertain. A jurist of the Shafi'i school (one of Sunni Islam's four legal traditions), he is listed among its scholars and is said to have taught law in Cairo.

His lasting fame rests on his Commentary on the Anatomy of the Canon of Avicenna, which contains the earliest known account of the pulmonary circulation: he argued that blood passes from the heart's right chamber through the lungs, rejecting the older Galenic idea of pores in the wall between the heart's chambers. He also wrote the philosophical tale Theologus Autodidactus (al-Risala al-Kamiliyya). He died in Cairo on 17 December 1288 (687 AH), bequeathing his house and library to a Cairo hospital.