Great doctors and scientists from the East: from princes of Persia, to icons of Asian science

Abstract

Asian scholars especially from Iran and China preserved most of the wisdom and knowledge of antiquity in their writing and they had great influence even on both European traditional and modern medical sciences. The current searching was done by the keywords in main indexing systems including PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus and Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science as well as the search engine of Google Scholar. Avicenna famous book was Canon, which reviewed all medical knowledge studied by the ancient Greek and Muslim scientists. Avicenna has introduced many medicinal plants and herbs and its knowledge influenced by both Eastern and Western traditional science. Rhazes was a great Persian alchemist, musician, mathematician, philosopher and physician. Bian Que was one of the most famous medical man and physician in ancient China who attached particular importance to the changes in the pulse examination. He is known as the founder of traditional Chinese medicine, and his four diagnostic methods were inspection, smelling and listening, inquiry, and palpation. Hua Tuo, Zhang Zhongjing, and Ge Hong were eclectic philosophers who dedicated his life to searching for physical immortality and traditional Chinese medicine, which he thought was attainable through alchemy. Sun Simiao also valued sanitation, exercise and disease prevention. Li Shizhen, a famous Chinese scholar who compiled a highly influential material medica. It is recommended to survey on their rules in different majors with details in future studies to make a better connection between modern and historical medical science.