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Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi was less of a chemist and more of a physician. Al-Razi was born in 865AD in modern-day Iran. Al-Razi focused his research on, “…therapeutics, lacking the concern of later writers for refining the classification of symptoms” (Savage-Smith, 2012) Among many he was considered the first clinician and was the foundation of medical science both in Iraq, where he helped to set up the first hospital, and in Europe, where is textbooks and journals were translated into Latin. In Europe, “…there was much interest in inoculation or variolation around 1720 following the description of [his] procedure…” (Savage-Smith, 2012) Al-Razi had been dead for a millennium, and yet his procedure gained ground in Europe and became a foundation part of our modern-day vaccine science. We can thank much of al-Razi for our current wellbeing from diseases such as polio, which was able to be irradicated by vaccines, the product of inoculations. Al-Razi was also a very religious man. A heavy practitioner of Islam he believed, “…God imposed on physicians the oath not to compose mortiferous remedies.” (Sattar, 2021) Here not only is he revealing his reverence to God, he is also stating what was the precursor, or influencer of the Hippocratic oath which states to “Do no harm.” If the Islamic faith was behind that philosophy, the influence on modern medicine is immense, as all physicians in America swear by an oath that took inspiration from Islamic religious philosophy.
References
Savage-Smith, E. (2012, July 10). Islamic Culture and the Medical Arts. Retrieved from NIH US National Library of Medicine: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/islamic_medical/index.html#toc
Sattar, M. (2021, November 4). The Greatest Physician of Islam and the Medieval Ages: Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Al-Razi (Rhazes). Retrieved from https://www.reviewofreligions.org/: https://www.reviewofreligions.org/34769/the-greatest-physician-of-islam-and-the-medieval-ages-muhammad-ibn-zakariya-al-razi-rhazes/
Sattar, M. (2021, November 4). The Greatest Physician of Islam and the Medieval Ages: Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Al-Razi (Rhazes). Retrieved from https://www.reviewofreligions.org/: https://www.reviewofreligions.org/34769/the-greatest-physician-of-islam-and-the-medieval-ages-muhammad-ibn-zakariya-al-razi-rhazes/