The Golden Thread

The Physician Who Wrote for the Poor


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In ninth-century Baghdad, a Persian physician named Ab Bakr al-Rz --- known in the West as Rhazes --- was quietly remaking the world of medicine. He questioned Galen, distinguished smallpox from measles, and built a hospital by hanging meat in the open air. But perhaps his most radical act was a small, practical handbook written for people who would never see the inside of his hospital. Harmonia walks the streets of Baghdad with one of the finest scientific minds of the Islamic Golden Age --- a man who understood, without ever stopping to name it, that knowledge offered in service of another person's wellbeing is one of the quietest forms of love available to a human life.

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The Golden ThreadBy Adam Bauer