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http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ali_Ibn_Isa&oldid=348636447
Ali ibn Isa (940-1010AD) is considered one of the most famous physicians of the tenth century. His famous Notebook of the Oculists combined information obtained from both Greco-Roman and Arab sources. The book encompassed information on treatment and classification of over one hundred different eye diseases. In the book, eye diseases were sorted by their anatomical location. The Notebook of the Oculists was widely used by European physicians for hundreds of years. Ibn Isa’s book was one of the first, along with Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s Ten Treatises on the Eye, to illustrate anatomy of the eye. Specifically, Ibn Isa illustrated the optic chiasm and brain [3].
Ibn Isa was the first to describe and suggest treatment for an array of diseases. For example, he was the first to discover the symptoms of Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada Syndrome (VKH) – ocular inflammation associated with a distinct whitening of the hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes [4]. Ibn Isa was also the first to classify epiphora as being a result a result of overzealous cautery of pterygium. In addition to this pioneering description, Ibn Isa also suggested treatments for epiphora based on the stage of the disease – namely treatment in the early stages with astringent materials, for example ammonia salt, burned copper, or lid past and a hook dissection with a feathered quill for chronic stages of epiphora [2]. Ibn Isa is also thought to be the first to describe temporal arteritis, although Sir Jonathan Hutchinson (1828-1913) is erroneously credited with this [1].
References:
[1] Baum E, Sams WM, Payne R. Giant cell arteritis: a systemic disease with rare cutaneous manifestations. J Am Acad Dermatol 1982 (6): 1081–1088
[2] Hirst Lawrence W. The treatment of pterygium. Surv Ophthalmol 2003;48:145-80.
[3] Lin, Daren. “A Foundation of Western Ophthalmology in Medieval Islamic Medicine” UWOMJ 78 (1) (2008), 41-45
[4] Paredes I, Ahmed M, Foster C S. Immunomodulatory therapy for Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada patients as first line therapy. Ocul Immunol Inflamm. 2006 (14): 87–90
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Shams al-Din Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Khalili worked in Damascus, Syria at the Umayyad Mosque as a religious timekeeper (muwaqqit) for the majority of his life. Other than al-Khalili’s occupation, little is known about his life. He lived at the same time as Ibn al Shatir – the famous Arab astronomer [2]. Al-Khalili is known for two sets of mathematical tables he constructed, both totaling roughly 30,000 entries. He tabulated all the entries made by the celebrated Egyptian Muslim astronomer Ibn Yunus, except for the entries that al-Khalili made himself for the city of Damascus. It is evident that number manipulation did not exhaust al-Khalili as he computed 13,000 entries into his ‘Universal Tables’ of different auxiliary functions which allowed him to generate the solutions of standard problems of spherical astronomy for any given latitude. In addition to this, he created a 3,000 entry table that gave the direction of the city of Mecca (the Qibla) for all latitudes and longitudes for all the Muslim countries of the 14th century [1]. Knowledge of the direction of the Qibla is essential in Islam because Muslims pray in the direction of Mecca. The values present in al-Khalili’s tables have been determined to be amazingly accurate – indeed they have been calculated to be accurate up to three or four significant decimal digits. Up to the present time, it is not known how exactly al-Khalili went about calculating each of his entries [3].
References:
[1] D A King, Al-Khalili’s auxiliary tables for solving problems of spherical astronomy, J. Hist. Astronom. 4 (2) (1973), 99-110.
[2] D A King, Al-Khalili’s qibla table, J. Near-Eastern Stud. 34 (2) (1975), 81-122.
[3] G Van Brummelen, The numerical structure of al-Khalili’s auxiliary tables, Physis Riv. Internaz. Storia Sci. (N.S.) 28 (3) (1991), 667-697.