Masawaih Al-Mardini
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Masawaih al-Mardini (Yahyā ibn Masawaih al-Mardini; known as Mesue the Younger) was an Assyrian physician. He was born in
Mardin Mardin (; ; romanized: ''Mārdīn''; ; ) is a city and seat of the Artuklu District of Mardin Province in Turkey. It is known for the Artuqids, Artuqid architecture of its old city, and for its strategic location on a rocky hill near the Tigris ...
,
Upper Mesopotamia Upper Mesopotamia constitutes the Upland and lowland, uplands and great outwash plain of northwestern Iraq, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey, in the northern Middle East. Since the early Muslim conquests of the mid-7th century, the regio ...
. After working in
Baghdad Baghdad ( or ; , ) is the capital and List of largest cities of Iraq, largest city of Iraq, located along the Tigris in the central part of the country. With a population exceeding 7 million, it ranks among the List of largest cities in the A ...
, he entered to the service of the Fatimid caliph
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah Abu Ali al-Mansur (; 13 August 985 – 13 February 1021), better known by his regnal name al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (), was the sixth Fatimid caliph and 16th Ismaili imam (996–1021). Al-Hakim is an important figure in a number of Shia Ism ...
. He died in 1015 in
Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...
at the age of ninety. Masawaih al-Mardini was a
Nestorian Christian Nestorianism is a term used in Christian theology and Church history to refer to several mutually related but doctrinarily distinct sets of teachings. The first meaning of the term is related to the original teachings of Christian theologian ...
. He is known due to his books on purgatives and emetics (''De medicins laxativis'') and on the complete ''pharmacopoeia'' in 12 parts called the ''Antidotarium sive Grabadin medicamentorum'', which remained for centuries the standard textbook of pharmacy in the West. He also described methods of distillation of empyreumatic oils. A method of extracting oil from "some kind of bituminous shale", one of the first descriptions of extraction of
shale oil Shale oil is an unconventional oil produced from oil shale rock fragments by pyrolysis, hydrogenation, or thermal dissolution. These processes convert the organic matter within the rock (kerogen) into synthetic oil and gas. The resulting oil c ...
was described by him in the 10th century.


References

Physicians from the Fatimid Caliphate 1015 deaths 11th-century physicians Year of birth unknown 11th-century people from the Abbasid Caliphate 11th-century Egyptian people 11th-century people from the Fatimid Caliphate Church of the East writers Christians from the Fatimid Caliphate Medieval Assyrian physicians Syriac writers {{Syria-bio-stub