Episode 3: How Islamic Medicine Changed The World?

Don't you just hate being ill?

Thankfully advances in modern medicine have led to today's illnesses being managed and treated like never before.

We don't often hear of Muslims being inventors scientists or changing the world but what if we told you a world of medicine and health as you know it would be completely different had it not been for the Innovation and knowledge of the Islamic world.

This series will take a look at some of the things we take for granted today that wouldn't have been possible without some of the inventions and advances of the Islamic golden age. This video will focus on Islamic medicine.

Armed with the Quran which made numerous mentions of healing and knowing that God said he has created a cure for every illness, Muslims excelled in discovering new Realms in medical science at a time where Baghdad alone had some 80 hospitals, some of the greatest legacies of the Muslim world to this day are in the medical field.

Al-Razi was one of the world's first great medical experts. He is considered the father of psychology and psychotherapy a pioneer in ophthalmology and was the author of
the first ever book on pediatrics.

The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted Rays like a laser which enabled us to
see. The first person to realize that light enters the eye rather than leaving it was 10th Century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist IBN Al Haytham. He invented the first pinhole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters.

One of the most famous names from Islamic history was Ibn-Sina known as the greatest healer of his time. His encyclopedic book Al-Qanun Fi Al Tib, The Canon of medicine was translated into Latin towards the end of the 12th century and became a reference source of medical studies in the universities of Europe until the end of the 17th century.

Many modern surgical instruments are off exactly the same design as those divides in the 10th Century by a Muslim surgeon called Al-Zaharawi his scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognizable to a modern surgeon.

In the 13th century another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood 300 years before William Harvey discovered it.

Muslim doctors also invented anesthetics of opium and alcohol mixers and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.

The concept of vaccinations were devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.