“Ibn Sina and the Clinical Trial”

A well-written paper on history of medicine was recently published by Sajadi and co-workers in the "Annals of Internal Medicine". The paper focused on one of the major scientific contributions of the reputable medieval Iranian scholar, Ibn Sina (in Latin Avicenna), to medicine and pharmacology. The authors looked mainly at Ibn Sinaʹs impact on applying logic to drug testing as the basis for further development of modern pharmacologic and clinical trials. Later, in the 18th century, Dr. James Lind (1716 – 1794), the Scottish physician, started formal experimentation with drugs and as Mellinkoff says:" he had conducted the first scientific, controlled experiment in the history of clinical medicine." In addition, the paper of Sajadi and colleagues also briefly introduces Razi (Rhazes), the Iranian medical scholar of the10th century AD, as the first known physician who used a control group in a human trial.