Ibn al-Nafis describes the pulmonary circulation, 1239–1242

Ibn al-Nafis describes the pulmonary circulation

In his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna’s Canon, the Damascus-born physician Ibn al-Nafis, then working in Cairo, rejected Galen’s teaching that blood passes through invisible pores in the wall between the ventricles of the heart, and argued that it reaches the left side of the heart through the lungs — the earliest known description of the pulmonary circulation.

Date

between 1239 and 1242exact date unknown: an interval is given

Place

Cairotoday: Cairo, Egypt · Middle East and Egypt

Participants

Ibn al-Nafis

Threads

Asia, Africa and the Americas in the 13th century

Also known as

Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon; Sharh Tashrih al-Qanun; Pulmonary circulation; Малый круг кровообращения; Шарх ташрих аль-Канун

Ibn al-Nafis held that the substance of the heart in the septum is solid and has “neither a visible passage … nor an invisible one”: the blood from the right ventricle goes through the pulmonary artery into the lungs and returns by the pulmonary vein to the left ventricle. He also taught that the heart is nourished by the coronary vessels and that there must be small passages between the branches of the pulmonary artery and vein — some four centuries before Marcello Malpighi saw the capillaries. He wrote the commentary at the age of 29; since his birth is dated between 1210 and 1213, it falls between 1239 and 1242.

Ibn al-Nafis studied medicine at the Nuri hospital in Damascus and in 1236 moved to Egypt, where he worked at the Nasiri hospital and, by some accounts, was physician to Sultan Baibars; in old age he headed the newly founded Mansuri hospital in Cairo, and he died there in 1288. His account was rediscovered only in 1924, when the Egyptian physician Muhyo al-Deen al-Tatawi came upon a manuscript in the Prussian State Library in Berlin while writing a doctoral thesis for the University of Freiburg. In Europe the passage of blood through the lungs was described by Michael Servetus in 1553 and then by Realdo Colombo; whether they knew of Ibn al-Nafis is debated, and many historians credit them with an independent discovery.

Connections

Related events

Galen in Rome162 · Western and Central EuropeHe rejected Galen’s teaching that blood passes through invisible pores in the septum of the heart

Ibn Sina's ‘Canon of Medicine’between 1020 and 1025 · Middle East and EgyptIbn al-Nafis set out his discovery in a commentary on the anatomy of Ibn Sina’s Canon

Reign of Sultan Baibars24 October 1260 – between 30 June and 1 July 1277 · Middle East and EgyptBy some accounts Ibn al-Nafis was physician to Sultan Baibars

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Ibn al-Nafis describes the pulmonary circulation

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Meanwhile in the world

Western and Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Balkans and Anatolia

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

East Asia

North America

Latin America

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