Google Doodle Celebrates the 1147th Birthday of Pioneering Physician Rhazes

Google regularly uses doodles to mark special occasions and people. It had one every day during the Olympics and has decided to give people a breather since.

But it's been running a few local doodles though, the latest being dedicated to noted physicist, chemist and scholar Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, or Razes as his name has been Latinized, which was shown in the Arabic world.

Google celebrated his 1147th birthday, certainly one of the oldest figures to be included in a doodle. It's hard to pinpoint an actual birthdate on people born 200 years ago, let alone more than 1,000 years ago.

Razes was a noted physician, introducing many new concepts to medicine. He was the first to recognize that smallpox and measles are two different diseases and offered a method for making the distinction.

He also discovered allergies and wrote the first papers on immunology. Similarly, he was the first to recognize that fever was a defense mechanism against disease.

Though his main contributions were to medicine, he researched alchemy and chemistry as well. He was the first to distil petroleum and discover kerosene. He was also the first to come up with sulphuric acid.