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There are many manuscripts of it, some fourteen editions in the fifteenth century and thirty-eight in the sixteenth, and it continued to be reprinted far into the seventeenth century. He too was dominated by the surgery of the Arabs, and on nearly every page one reads of the sages Avicenna, Albucasis or Rhazes.
Rhazes lived well on into the tenth century. His successor in prestige, though not his serious rival, was Ali Ben el-Abbas, usually spoken of in medical literature as Ali Abbas, a distinguished Arabian physician who died near the end of the tenth century. This became the leading text-book of medicine for the Arabs until replaced by the "Canon of Avicenna" some two centuries later.
This man was the pupil of the learned Rhazes, and the tutor of the equally learned Avicenna, the link, in fact, between them; but his name, for some reason, perhaps because he mixed with his practice a greater degree of mysticism than was approved by the Arabian schools of the next generation, has not come down to us.
The great physician Rhazes is said to have selected the site for one of these hospitals by hanging pieces of meat in various places about the city, selecting the site near the place at which putrefaction was slowest in making its appearance.
The exact year of his birth is not known, but he flourished in the second half of the tenth century. He is said to have lived to the age of 101. The name of his principal work, which embraces the whole of medicine, is "Altasrif," or "Tesrif," which has been translated "The Miscellany." Most of what he has to say about medical matters is taken from Rhazes.
Still more striking evidence of their influence is found in the text-book of Ferrari, which was printed in 1471 and had been circulated earlier in MS. In it Avicenna is quoted more than 3000 times, Rhazes and Galen 1000, Hippocrates only 140 times. Professor Ferrari was a man who played an important role in the university, and had a large consultation practice.
After Rhazes, the most important contributors to medical literature from among the Arabs, with the single exception of Avicenna, were born in Spain. They are Albucasis or Abulcasis, the surgeon; Avenzoar, the physician, and Averroës, the philosophic theorist in medicine. Besides, it may be recalled here that Maimonides, the great Jewish physician, was born and educated at Cordova, in Spain.
Besides, what he has to say about dentistry occurs in typical medieval form. It is found in a commentary on Rhazes, written just about the middle of the fifteenth century. In the later true Renaissance such a commentary would have been on a Greek author.
For four years he worked in his laboratory, with the book of Rhazes continually before him. At the end of that time, he found that he had spent no less than eight hundred crowns upon his experiment, and had got nothing but fire and smoke for his pains. He now began to lose confidence in Rhazes, and turned to the works of Geber.
On account of his zeal for study Rhazes was known as the "Experimentator." The first of the Arabians, known throughout the Middle Ages as the Prince, the rival, indeed, of Galen, was the Persian Ibn Sina, better known as Avicenna, one of the greatest names in the history of medicine.
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