The second-century physician and philosopher Galen is not known for brevity. Although his writings on medicine are famously verbose and numerous, for centuries they constituted much of the standard syllabi for medical students. About fourteen hundred...

This book is the record of a debate that took place in the early tenth century between the famous Ismaili missionary Abu Hatim al-Razi and the even more celebrated Abu Bakr al-Razi, a physician and philosopher who was known to medieval Europe as "Rha...