Al-Razi decided to conduct a trial to see if bloodletting worked as a treatment for meningitis. Two things are interesting about this trial. The first is the fact that he was not prepared just to accept Galen’s idea as it stood, but wanted to put it to a proper test. The second thing is the methodology he used, which gives us an insight into his thinking. In his hospital he let one group of meningitis patients go untreated; but he treated another group by bloodletting in the normal way. Interestingly, the results of the trial supported Galen’s view that bloodletting was an effective treatment – although few would accept that particular finding today.
In Doubts about Galen, al-Razi also seems to question the theory behind Galen’s basic system. He asks if it is really true that giving a patient a hot drink would raise their body temperature even higher than that of the drink, as the theory of humours would seem to imply. It takes only a simple test, of course, to show that this is not true. If it is not, al-Razi suggests, there must be other control mechanisms in the body that the humours do not explain, but it is unclear how far he went with such ideas.
No-one really followed up al-Razi’s doubts about the entire system of humours, though, and it was another thousand years before it was seriously challenged. However, in the South Asian Unani school of herbal medicine, it is still used as a basis of medical treatment by a majority of people in countries such as Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This is partly because modern healthcare is still unaffordable in these regions.
