Ibn al-Nafis
c. 1213 CE–c. 1288 CE · Damascus
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.
Did you know?
The Cairo doctor who described the lungs' circulation 300 years early
Around 1242 CE, the physician Ibn al-Nafis, working in Cairo, described how blood passes from the right side of the heart through the lungs before returning to the left side — the pulmonary circulation. He set this down in his commentary on the anatomy of Ibn Sina's Canon, more than three centuries before the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) published his own account of the circulation in his 1628 De Motu Cordis. The Arabic manuscript only resurfaced in the 20th century.
How we know
Ibn al-Nafis (c. 1213–1288), Commentary on the Anatomy of the Canon of Avicenna c. 1242 CE (manuscript rediscovered 1924); William Harvey (1578–1657), De Motu Cordis, 1628. Gap: 1628 − 1242 = 386 years.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
DamascusדמשקSyria
What they did here
Ibn al-Nafis was born c. 1210-1213 (c. 607 AH) in or near Damascus and trained in medicine there at the Nuri Bimaristan (teaching hospital), reportedly under the physician al-Dakhwar (d. 1230). The Dictionary of Scientific Biography places his birth at 'al-Qurashiyya, near Damascus'; other accounts read his nisba al-Qarshi as Qurashi tribal descent. The two readings are not reconciled in the sources.
About Damascus
Major Sephardi center; where Chaim Vital lived from 1594 and wrote much of the Shaar collection.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn al-Nafis’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Christian world
Jewish world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.