In the history of medicine, Ibn Masawayh is one of the names that keeps returning.
The record lists Ibn Masawayh as Assyrian physician.
Ibn Masawayh was born at Gundeshapur in 777.
Much of this period's medical learning passed through the Islamic world, where Greek texts were preserved, corrected and extended.
The test of medical work is whether practice changed, not whether the argument was elegant.
Ibn Masawayh died in 857, aged 80. What survives is the change in practice, which is how a medical life is actually measured.
