Galen

known in late Europe as Avicenna, whose canon of medicine became one of the most important medical synthesis ever produced and remained a foundational university text and part of Europe for centuries.

Avicenna inherited Galenic humoral physiology and Aristolian natural philosophy, yet his medicine cannot be reduced to either source, because he organized the body through a systematic account of elements, temperaments, humors, faculties, organs, spirits, causes, signs, and treatments.

creating a framework through which individual diseases could be understood in relation to the constitution of the entire organism.

Sexual function belonged inside this larger system rather than forming a separate private category.

The moral and legal question concerned the circumstances, partners, obligations, and consequences of sexual behavior rather than the mere existence of bodily enjoyment.

This distinction allowed physicians to discuss sexual pleasure pragmatically, yet it did not free the medical literature from the gender hierarchy, reproductive expectations, slavery, concubinage, and unequal social power of the societies in which it was written.

Medieval Arabic and Persian medical literature preserved arguments concerning whether women produced seed, whether female pleasure assisted conception, and how the reproductive contributions of male and female bodies should be understood, often drawing upon the disagreement among Hippocratic, Aristotelian, and Galenic authorities." The persistence of this debate shows that ancient physiology had not resolved the status of female orgasm.

Instead, the question became one thread inside a larger effort to reconcile inherited authorities.

Suddenly, the merchant finds himself explaining why he would quite like to keep his own belongings.

Even more extraordinary is a story concerning Ptolemy III According to the later physician Galen, the king persuaded the Athenians to lend him precious official copies of plays by the great Greek tragedians.

He provided a substantial financial deposit as security.

Then, having obtained the manuscripts, he reportedly kept the originals and returned beautiful new copies instead.

But Baghdad's intellectual life was not limited to mathematics.

Scholars studied medicine, astronomy, geography, philosophy, and literature.

They translated and debated works associated with figures such as Aristotle, Galen, and Euclid.

And they built upon those traditions, developing new ideas of their own.

Yeah, wonderful question.

And actually Galen, the famous physician from 2000 years ago, thought that the pancreas was just padding because it had so little growth structure.

And everyone believed Galen for 1000 years until in the 1500s virsung anatomist discovered a duct and he said ah if the pancreas has a duct it must be producing something and that changed everything so the gross is not that exciting it's a tan yellow gland but microscopically it's extremely interesting composed mostly of these cells making our digestive enzymes the acinar cells they release their enzymes into small ducts that emerge and form bigger and bigger ducts as it goes down to the duodenum, and then scattered throughout our little islands of neuroendocrine cells named after Paul Langerhans, the Dutch pathologist, anatomist, who discovered them.

And this is where insulin and glucagon are produced that help control our blood sugar.

So it's really, as I mentioned, two organs in one.

I literally lay out Plato's, citing the actual books here.

of what he's referring to and how this shaped the Western understanding of the human soul, along with virtue, a la Aristotle, and human flourishing, the Hippocratic Oath, and the Galenic medicine.

So Galen, if you're not familiar, one of the most important physicians.

This set the standard for how the West understood healing.

And he actually worked with the late Egyptian-born Arab Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail and responded to RFK's comments by saying that he thinks Ahmed would have disagreed with Kennedy and added, God rest his soul, he didn't have to endure this.

And of course, RFK Jr. forgets that it was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down to the Renaissance.

You even had calls for RFK to be fired over this with the Council on American Islamic Relations saying, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vile anti-Arab rant is a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry.

Saying his sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide.