Don't know much about history...

Several years ago I was privileged enough to take a course on the History of Medicine.  What made the course particularly extraordinary was that it was taught by one of the most wonderfully brilliant, kind, and interesting professors one could possibly have. His name is Dr. William Campbell. Those of you who are Jeopardy! champions might recognize his name. You see, Dr. Campbell won the Nobel Prize for medicine this past year. I learned a great many things in his class and one of them was how the history of medicine (and really all the sciences) had a really infertile period where nobody really discovered anything new...basically between the years 500 and 1500. This time period was also known as the Dark Ages.  I remember Dr. Campbell spending about 10 minutes on this bleak period in Western science and he did make a quick mention of how there were some advances in medicine in the Islamic world at this time, but he really didn't cover them. And then I forgot about that particular lecture, until today.

Today is when I visited The Istanbul Museum for the History of Science and Technology in Islam. While the West spent about 1000 doing nothing to advance the concept of science, it turns out that the Islamic world was a beehive of scientific activity. Each room in the museum focused on a different branch of science. I was amazed by the room devoted to medical history. During the Dark Ages, the Islamic world was doing things like figuring out how the eye works, developing the field of ophthalmology, and figuring out how blood circulates through the body. These advancements were matched across the spectrum of the sciences, including mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, and physics.

Some of these contributions were forgotten, some were built upon (but not credited) by the scientists of the Renaissance, and a few were acknowledged.  Goethe was one of the first to study and recognize these contributions and by 1900 some Western scholars were beginning to show how Islamic science played an important role in increasing human knowledge and served as a significant contributor to human advancement.  I had a vague notion about all of this before I visited Istanbul, but after today I had a much clearer indication of the amazing linkage between Islam and the sciences during their millennium of discovery.

When we think about Islam in the year 2016, we need to understand it in its entirety. Many I've talked to in the U.S., associate Islam with backwardness and anti-scientific irrationality.  Clearly this is not the case.  We would be wiser to associate backwardness and anti-scientific irrationality with fundamentalism and religious dogmatism that is present in most religions including both fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam.  I will never forget the day I was tasked several years ago with tutoring a group of Christian home-schoolers in the sciences.  I received the kids' textbook, which assailed evolution and a whole range of legitimate scientific theories (and advanced notions like a 6000-year-old Earth) and at that point I realized that no amount of tutoring would ever help these children ever achieve scientific literacy.  So, let us celebrate the scientific achievements of all cultures and stand against any force from whatever group of fundamentalists who place dogma above science.

So, although in my History of Medicine course, I only heard a brief mention of Islamic contributions to the sciences, I made up for it today and now have a much more complete sense of the debt we owe to Islam in a multitude of scientific fields and have punctured one more small hole in the giant wall of obliviousness that surrounds me.

Museum Entrance

One of the dozens of astronomical devices developed by Islamic scientists during their scientific renaissance

Dozens of surgical tools developed around the year 1100 for surgery of the eye, far in advance of anything present in the West at that time.