The death of Ibn al-Nafis, discoverer of the pulmonary circulation

The learned physician ʿAlaʾ al-Din Ibn al-Nafis — who described the pulmonary (lesser) circulation of the blood four centuries before the Europeans — died in Cairo, and endowed his house and books to the Mansuri hospital.

Ibn al-Nafis was born in Damascus around 607 AH and studied medicine at the Nuri hospital, then moved to Cairo, where he headed its physicians and worked at the Nasiri then the Mansuri hospital. Alongside medicine he combined Shafiʿi jurisprudence, legal theory and logic.

In his "Commentary on the Anatomy of the Canon" he differed with Galen and Ibn Sina, who held that blood passed from the right ventricle to the left through pores in the septum. He established that the blood passes from the right ventricle to the lung, is aerated there, then returns to the left — the very description of the pulmonary circulation that the Europeans did not reach for centuries.

He also wrote "al-Shamil fi'l-Sinaʿa al-Tibbiyya," which he planned in three hundred volumes, and "al-Mujaz fi'l-Qanun," which physicians circulated for centuries. When death approached him he refused wine as medicine and said: I will not meet Allah with any of it in my belly, and he died in Cairo in Dhu'l-Qaʿda 687 AH.