Rhazes

His name is Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi. He was known one of the greatest physicians of the middle ages.

Known as Rhazes, this man was regarded as an influential alchemist, philosopher and Persian scholar.

Rhazes (854-925), a native of Ray, near modern Tehran, became the Caliph’s personal physician in Baghdad.

He seems to have had a liberal early education in philosophy and in philology and literature. He did not take up medicine until later in life.

His of medicine were made in Baghdad, where Ibn Zein el-Taberi was his teacher. He returned to his native town and was for some time the head of the hospital there.

The fame of Rhazes spread through the lands of the caliph and his services were in constant demand even in distant cities. He attended most of the nobles and princes of the minor Persian courts.

He wrote extensively, gave a careful account of smallpox. Which he differentiated from measles and produced the largest and heaviest medical book printed before 1500.

Rhazes advocated for the practice of evidence-based medicine in the middle ages. He developed standards of question and practice that provided the foundation for modern thought on evidence based medicine.

For his patron al-Mansur, governor of Ray, Razes wrote a comprehensive treatise on therapeutics. It was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona on the late twelfth century as the Book for Al-Mansur.

By the fourteenth century a book 9 of treatise – a head to toe survey of diseases- had firmly established place in the medical curriculum.

Among other works priority in importance and in interest must be given to his al-Hawi or Continens. In its Latin form it is available in the edition translated by Faraj ibn Salem or Farraguth for King Charles of Anjou in 1279 and printed at Brescia in 1486.

In this book Rhazes quotes widely and extensively from many Galenic works, including ‘De demonstratione’ and it is so large a book that no full index of his authorities has yet been made.

Rhazes also produced the text Secret of Secret. It included a great deal of practical and useful chemistry. It was suggested that the preparation of pure hydrochloride acid, nitric and sulfuric acids by Europeans in the thirteenth century depended crucially in the technology described by Razes.
Rhazes