The Baghdad doctor who chose a hospital site by watching meat rot
Asked to build the largest hospital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Persian physician al-Razi reportedly hung pieces of fresh meat around Baghdad and picked the spot where they spoiled most slowly. It was a crude test of healthy air, but it captured his habit of settling questions by observation instead of authority.
Abu Bakr al-Razi, known in Europe as Rhazes, was born around 864 or 865 in Ray, a Silk Road city on the southern slopes of the Alborz mountains near modern Tehran. He trained at a hospital in Baghdad, returned home to run the hospital in Ray at the invitation of its governor, Mansur ibn Ishaq, and was later called back to direct a Baghdad hospital. He wrote more than 200 works covering medicine, alchemy, logic, astronomy and grammar, and his sharp criticism of prophethood survives only through hostile reporters.
His medicine leaned on evidence. He compared meningitis patients who were bled with those who were not, to see whether bloodletting helped. He challenged Galen's account of urinary complaints, noting the Greek had seen three cases while he himself had studied hundreds. With Thabit ibn Qurra he wrote one of the earliest surviving books treating smallpox and measles as separate diseases. His huge notebook collection, compiled after his death as the 23-volume Al-Hawi, reached Latin in 1279, and he also designed flasks, mortars and phials that pharmacies used into the early twentieth century.
He taught in rings: a question went first to his inner circle of students, then outward, and reached al-Razi only if everyone failed. He treated poor patients free of charge and wrote a home handbook for people with no doctor nearby. He mocked quacks but also warned that even learned physicians cannot cure everything, and joked that treating princes was hardest because they ignored orders about diet.
Late in life he went blind. One story blames a blow from his patron after an alchemy demonstration failed, another a diet of beans. Offered an ointment, he supposedly asked the healer how many layers the eye has, and refused treatment when no answer came. Al-Biruni, who regarded him as a mentor, recorded his death in Ray in 925, aged sixty.
Source: Abu Bakr al-Razi
