Ibn al-Nafis

Ibn al-Nafis was an Arab polymath whose work spanned medicine, surgery, physiology, anatomy, biology, Islamic jurisprudence and philosophy. He is credited as the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of the blood, work that predates the 1628 account by William Harvey, the discovery popularly credited to Harvey in general audiences. His account challenged the physiology of the second-century Greek physician Galen, which had gone unchallenged for a thousand years, and he has been described as the father of circulatory physiology. He performed human dissections and gave an early account of the coronary and capillary circulations, and served as chief physician at the al-Naseri Hospital founded by Sultan Saladin. His birth year is disputed even within his own Wikipedia article: its short description gives 1213 while its infobox Islamic-calendar conversion points to 1210 or 1211.