about 1242
Ibn al-Nafis
Around 1242 Ibn al-Nafis, a physician from Damascus who worked in Cairo, wrote a commentary on the anatomy in Avicenna's Canon of Medicine. In it he rejected Galen's pores. The wall between the ventricles is thick and solid, he wrote, and blood cannot pass through it.
He wrote that the blood of the right ventricle must go by the pulmonary artery to the lungs, mix there with air, and return by the pulmonary veins to the left side of the heart. This is the short loop, described nearly 400 years before Harvey.
His commentary stayed almost unknown in Europe. There the same passage through the lungs was described again by Michael Servetus in 1553 and by Realdo Colombo in 1559. Harvey knew Colombo's account.
Michael Servetus, engraving by Christian Fritzsch, about 1740, with his burning at Geneva in 1553 behind himWikimedia Commons, Christian Fritzsch, Public domain (Michael Servetus.jpg)
Sources
- Max Meyerhof, Ibn an-Nafis (XIIIth cent.) and his theory of the lesser circulation, Isis 23 (1935): 100-120.
- John West, Ibn al-Nafis, the pulmonary circulation, and the Islamic Golden Age, Journal of Applied Physiology 105 (2008): 1877-1880.
Prev: GalenNext: The bandaged arm