A closer look
For centuries, European and Middle Eastern doctors treated the ancient Greek physician Galen like an infallible god of medicine. Enter Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, a 12th-century polymath who visited Egypt during a devastating famine. Instead of just writing a sad diary, he took advantage of the massive piles of unburied skeletons to do some hands-on research. He casually noticed that Galen's teachings on the human lower jaw and sacrum were completely wrong, championing empirical observation over blind tradition by roasting classical medicine with a mountain of real skulls.
