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Verification And Utility In The Arabic Commentaries On The Canon Of Medicine: Examples From The Works Of Fakhr Al-Dīn Al-Rāzī (D. 1210) And Ibn Al-Nafīs (D. 1288), Nahyan Fancy

History Faculty publications

Although over two dozen Arabic commentaries on the Canon of Medicine were composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, historians of medicine have paid scant attention to them. Instead, these commentaries have often been dismissed as being uncritical expositions that further entrenched the dogma of Galenic/Avicennan medical theory. In this article, I shall show that in fact the opposite was the case for at least a subset of the Canon commentaries from this period. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī developed a new style of verification commentary across his philosophical corpus that he also deployed in his Canon commentary. Even though Fakhr al-Dīn …