Al-Jurjani

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Zayn al-Din Sayyed Isma‘il ibn al-Husayn al-Jorjani, also spelled al-Jurjani and Gorgani, was a 12th-century royal physician from Gorgan, Iran.

Jurjani was a pupil of Ibn Abi Sadiq and Ahmad ibn Farrokh. He arrived at the court in the Persian province of Khwarazm in the year 1110 when he was already a septuagenarian. There he became a court physician to the governor of the province, Khwarazm-Shah Qutb al-Din Muhammad I ibn Nushtikin, who ruled from 1097 to 1127. It was to him that he dedicated his most comprehensive and influential work, the Persian-language compendium Zakhirah-i Khvarazm'Shahi.

Jurjani continued as court physcian to Khwarazm'Shah Qutb al-Din's son and successor, ‘Ala al-Ddowleh Atsoz, until at some unspecified time he moved to the city of Merv, the capital of the rival Seljuq Sultan Sanjar ibn Malikshah (ruled 1118-1157), where he died nearly at 100 lunar years of age.

Jurjani composed a number of important medical and philosophical treatises, in both Persian and Arabic, most of them written after he moved to Khwarazm at the age of 70 lunar years.

Ljunggren (1983) suggests that Jurjani should be credited with recognizing Graves-Basedow disease, having noted the association of goitre and exophthalmos, in his Thesaurus of the Shah of Khwarazm, the most famous of his five books, and the major medical dictionary of its time.

[edit] Sources

B. Thierry de Crussol des Epesse, Discours sur l'oeil d'Esma`il Gorgani (Teheran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1998), pp. 7-13.
Lutz Richter-Bernburg, Persian Medical Manuscripts at the University of California, Los Angeles: A Descriptive Catalogue, Humana Civilitas, vol. 4 (Malibu: Udena Publications, 1978). pp. 208
C.A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey. Volume II, Part 2: E.Medicine (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1971), pp 207-211 no. 361
The article "Djurdjani" by J. Schacht in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, ed. by H.A.R. Gibbs, B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat, C. Bosworth et al., 11 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960-2002) (2nd ed.), vol. 2, p. 603
The article "Dakira-ye Kvarazmshahi" by `Ali-Akbar Sa`idi Sirjani in Encyclopedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, 6+ vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Costa Mesa: Mazda, 1983 to present), vol. 6 (1999) pp. 609-610.