 In his primary vocation of medicine, too, al-Rāzī had his critics, including Ibn Sīnā, his only rival for the title of most influential figure in the Islamic medical tradition. In an epistolary exchange with al-Bīrūnī, Ibn Sīnā says that al-Rāzī overreached his competence in both philosophy and medicine (“he exceeded his abilities when lancing abscesses and examining urine and feces”, quoted at al-Rāzī, RF: 290). Al-Rāzī’s project in Doubts was also deemed presumptuous by later medical writers, who composed refutations of the work. Nonetheless, al-Rāzī’s works were widely consulted by doctors in the Islamic world, and he had a wide diffusion in the Latin speaking world under the name “Rhazes”. This began in the medieval period and persisted through the Renaissance, with sixty-seven printed editions of his works before 1700 (Hasse 2016: 8). No less an authority than Vesalius edited an older translation of al-Rāzī’s Book for al-Manṣūr, and al-Rāzī’s medical writings were on the teaching syllabus at Bologna, the most important university in Europe for medical training (Siriasi 1990: 131 and 178). The independent-minded Girolamo Cardano, who in personality and diversity of interests was in some ways the heir of Galen and al-Rāzī, praised the latter as one of several doctors from the Islamic world who had improved upon Galenic medicine through empirical observation (experimentum) (Siriasi 1997: 60). More recently, al-Rāzī has been praised for his innovative approach and for breakthroughs in the history of medicine, for example by investigating differential diagnosis (Iskandar 1962) and using a control group to test the efficacy of a drug (Pormann 2008). Thus al-Rāzī the doctor has had a more illustrious posthumous career than al-Rāzī the philosopher.