Anatomy

Systematic human anatomical dissection was not a pursuit of medieval Islamic society any more than it was in the contemporaneous Christian lands. Many scholars in Islam lauded the study of anatomy, primarily as a way of demonstrating the design and wisdom of God, and there are some references in medical writings to dissection, though to what extent these reflect actual practice is problematic. There were, nonetheless, two noteworthy contributions made to the history of anatomy and physiology by medieval Islamic writers -- namely, the improvement in the description of the bones of the lower jaw and sacrum by `Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (d. 1231/629 H) following the chance observation of skeletons during a famine in Egypt, and the description of the movement of blood through the pulmonary transit by the Syrian jurist-physician Ibn al-Nafis, who died in 1288 (687 H).

In addition to his popular epitome of the Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina, Ibn al-Nafis also composed a commentary on the Canon in which he criticized Ibn Sina for spreading his discussion of anatomy over several different sections of the Canon. Ibn al-Nafis consequently prepared a separate commentary on just the anatomical portions, and it was in this commentary that he explicitly stated that the blood in the right ventricle of the heart must reach the left ventricle by way of the lungs and not through a passage connecting the ventricles, as Galen had maintained. This formulation of the pulmonary circulation was made three centuries before Michael Servetus (d. 1553) and Realdo Colombo (d. 1559), the first Europeans to describe the pulmonary circulation.

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