A few days ago I tweeted a picture of a clock in Germany with an illustration of ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān. Who was he?

A thread on a pretty fascinating Egyptian physician. Expect: MANY disputes (on chickens (yes), medical education, & Egypt) and a description of supernova SN 1006. 1/

First of all, Ibn Riḍwān (d.c. 453/1061) was a physician for the Fatimids who was self-educated (just as Ibn Sīnā). When he was young he wanted to get medical training from a physician in Iraq, but did not succeed, probably because he did not have the money. 2/

He tried attending some classes in Cairo but he says he did not find them useful. So, he studied by himself and as a result, he did not have any ijāzas for texts he had completed studying with an authorized transmitter. 3/

This was not really appreciated by his contemporaries and later doctors. Ibn al-Qifṭī (d.c.646/1248), for instance, critiqued his scholarly work, calling his treatises plagiarisms (mukhṭaṭafa). 4/

He also called him ugly. 5/

Ibn Riḍwān also got into a famous dispute with another doctor, his contemporary Ibn Buṭlān (d. 458/1066) (the author of the Taqwīm al-ṣiḥḥa, or Maintenance of Health), which they fought out in a number of treatises. 6/

Actually they got into multiple debates. They first had a fight about whether a chicken or a baby bird had a warmer nature. (Of course baby birds are warmer, Ibn Riḍwān argued) 7/

But next they disagreed on medical education. Their debate centred around the question whether medical books could be studied in isolation or not. 8/

To discuss this Ibn Buṭlān wrote a treatise entitled:

‘On the causes why he who learns from oral instruction by teachers learns better and more easily than he who learns from books, given that the receptive faculty of both of them is the same’. 9/

Ibn Buṭlān basically told Ibn Riḍwān that self-study is too problematic because of all the obscurities in books and problems of transmission that make it necessary to study the text with an authorized transmitter. 10/

(This wasn’t an uncommon view at the time and there was an intricate system of textual transmission in place that combined aural and written modes of reading aimed at decreasing transmission errors.) 11/

This was not just a theoretical dispute, it was ad hominem and the stakes were high. Ibn Riḍwān had called on medical practitioners in Cairo to boycott Ibn Buṭlān after their fight about the chicken and the bird. 12/

Now Ibn Buṭlān tried to discredit Ibn Riḍwān. And perhaps he even wanted to take over Ibn Riḍwān’s job as chief physician for the Fatimids. 13/

Ibn Riḍwan defended himself in his “Useful Book on the Quality of Medical Education” (In Arabic: al-Kitāb al-Nāfiʿ fī kayfiyyāt taʿlīm ṣināʿat al-ṭibb), saying self-education was fine.

14/

And he had in fact turned out fine as he was the personal doctor for a Fatimid sultan and had full financial stability. 15/

Ibn Riḍwān got into an entirely different (diachronic) debate with another doctor, Ibn al-Jazzār (d.979), about Egypt. Ibn Al-Jazzār had written a medical work about Egypt saying it was an unhealthy place. 16/

Ibn Ridwan responded with a treatise pointing out it wasn’t so bad, which was called: On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt” (Dafʿ maḍārr al-abdān). 17/

I discussed it here. It contains a discussion of epidemics and Ibn Riḍwān’s explanation of their causes. 18/ https://twitter.com/elainevdalen/status/1238529465279537154?s=20

Finally, like other scholars at the time, Ibn Riḍwān did not just confine himself to medicine. He also, among other things, worked as an astronomer. 19/

In this capacity, he observed the supernova SN 1006 and provided one of the most detailed descriptions known today. 20/

It is found in his commentary on Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, where he writes that the supernova was about 3 times the size of Venus and emanated a quarter of the light of the moon. 21/

So, in Europe he also became known as an astronomer, which is why he was on that astronimcal clock together with Ptolemy, Alfonso, and Abū Maʿshar. (end) https://twitter.com/elainevdalen/status/1246658455693377543?s=20

ps., the Ibn Riḍwān-Ibn Buṭlān dispute on education has recently been discussed by Aileen Das (2017), "The Hippocratism of Ibn Riḍwān", and also earlier by Meyerhof and Schoeler