Zakariya Razi The Iranian Physician and Scholar

According to Biruni, Abu Bakr Mohammad Zakariya Razi (Latin Rhazes) was born in Rayy (an ancient town south of present day Tehran) in the year 865 C.E. (251 A.H.) and died there in 925 C.E. (313 A.H.) or a few years later at the age of 60 or so. As Biruni mentions in his “Catalogue”, Razi spent his youth as an alchemist but around the age of thirty, due to failing vision, gave up alchemy and started his career as a physician. There is scant information available regarding Razi’s personal life, but it seems that he played the lute in his youth and wrote an encyclopedia of music. At that time, he was apparently a goldsmith by profession and as Ibn Abi Usaibia recounts in his “Lives of the Physicians” (1245 C.E.) he had come across an old manuscript of “Kitab al-Mansuri fi Tebb” hand written by Razi himself in which he had inscribed the title of the author as “Mohammad Zakariya al Razi al-Seirafi (the goldsmith).