Razi rejected the Artistotelian approach to knowledge.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences held the first of its Occasional Lecture Series in March. The speaker Dr Nomanul Haq is a Visiting Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilisations at the University of Pennsylvania. His talk was entitled: ‘The Contemporary Relevance of Razi: The Science of Medicine and Liberal Arts’.

Dr Haq introduced the audience to new ways of thinking about historical figures and their contributions to our understanding of the world. In the case of Razi, Dr Haq pointed out that Razi rejected the Artistotelian approach to knowledge, and instead approached medicine by gathering data through systematic clinical observation, laying the basis upon which medicine is studied today. Razi also described diseases that he had observed, differentiating for the first time between descriptions of small pox and measles.