Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi

Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162 to 1231) was a physician, philosopher, historian, Arabic grammarian and traveller from Baghdad, regarded as one of the most voluminous writers of his time. Much of what is known of his life comes from his own autobiography as preserved in Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah's literary history of medicine. As a young man he studied grammar, law, medicine, alchemy and philosophy, first taking Avicenna as his philosophical mentor and later turning toward Aristotle and the older Greek authors. He travelled to Mosul, Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo, enjoyed the patronage of Saladin, and returned to Baghdad in 1229. His best known work, an account of Egypt, describes the pyramids, ancient monuments and a famine he witnessed in 1200. While examining the many skeletons that famine left, he concluded that Galen was wrong about the formation of the lower jaw, the coccyx and the sacrum. He wrote a commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics and two pamphlets against alchemy, which he had briefly practised and then rejected.