Masawaih al-Mardini (Yahyā ibn Masawaih al-Mardini; known as Mesue the Younger) was a

Assyrian Assyrian may refer to: * Assyrian people, the indigenous ethnic group of Mesopotamia. * Assyria, a major Mesopotamian kingdom and empire. ** Early Assyrian Period ** Old Assyrian Period ** Middle Assyrian Empire ** Neo-Assyrian Empire * Assyri ...

physician. He was born in

Mardin Mardin ( ku, Mêrdîn; ar, ماردين; syr, ܡܪܕܝܢ, Merdīn; hy, Մարդին) is a city in southeastern Turkey. The capital of Mardin Province, it is known for the Artuqid architecture of its old city, and for its strategic location ...

Upper Mesopotamia Upper Mesopotamia is the name used for the 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 region has been ...

. After working in

Baghdad Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon ...

, he entered to the service of the

Fatimid caliph This is a list of an Arab dynasty, the Shi'ite caliphs of the Fatimid dynasty (909–1171). The Shi'ite caliphs were also regarded at the same time as the imams of the Isma'ili branch of Shi'a Islam. Family tree of Fatimid caliphs ...

Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah Abū ʿAlī Manṣūr (13 August 985 – 13 February 1021), better known by his regnal name al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh ( ar, الحاكم بأمر الله, lit=The Ruler by the Order of God), was the sixth Fatimid caliph and 16th Ismaili i ...

. He died in 1015 in

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metr ...

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 ...

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 Nestorians Church of the East writers Christians from the Fatimid Caliphate Medieval Assyrian physicians {{Syria-bio-stub