Abu Mansur Muwaffaq

This article is about the physician. For the Abbasid regent, see Al-Muwaffaq.

Abu Mansur Muvaffak Harawi (Template:Lang-fa) was a 10th-century Persian physician.

He flourished in Herat (modern-day Afghanistan), under the Samanid prince Mansur I, who ruled from 961 to 976.

He was apparently the first to think of compiling a treatise on materia medica in Persian; he travelled extensively in Persia and India to obtain the necessary information.

Abu Mansur distinguished between sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate, and seems to have had some knowledge about arsenious oxide, cupric oxide, silicic acid, and antimony; he knew the toxicological effects of copper and lead compounds, the depilatory vertue of quicklime, the composition of plaster of Paris and its surgical use.

The book al-abnyia

This book is the only compilation of him has remained.he wrote, between 968 and 977, the Book of the Remedies (Kitab al-Abnyia 'an Haqa'iq al-Adwiya, کتاب الابنیه عن حقائق الادویه), which is the oldest prose work in New Persian. It deals with 585 remedies (of which 466 are derived from plants, 75 from minerals, 44 from animals), classified into four groups according to their action. The oldest copy of this book that we have is for 1026 and has written by Asadi Toosi, famous poet, and is in Vienna library. in this copy the writer prays for the health of Muvaffak and this shows that he was alive in 1026 and claim of orientalists about his time of life contemporary to Mansur ibn Nuh Samani is wrong. He says in the introduction of book that he has used the books of previous traditional scientist.

See also

• List of Iranian scientists

Sources

• Fonahn, A., Zuar Quellenkunde Persian medicine, Leipzig, 1910
• C. Elgood. In: A medical history of Persia from the earliest times to the year 1932 AD 1932, Cambridge University Press, London (1951), p. V.
• Muvaffak A, Gurhan I, Gunduz U, Hasirci N., J Drug Target. 2005 Apr;13(3):151-9.
• Muvaffak A, Hasirci N. Adv Exp Med Biol. 2003;534:309-25.
• Sarton, G., Introduction to the History of Science, Baltimore,1927