The Avicenna (980-1037)

His name Abu Ali al-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina was born into a Persian family in the village of Afshana, near Bukhara in the year 980.

Ibn Sina, commonly known as Avicenna , was an Islamic philosopher and physician.

The Persian Avicenna was a child prodigy. By the age of 10 he could recite the Qur’an by heart. That Avicenna has mastered the Qur’an by memorizing it at such an early age is evidence of his amazing memory.

By age 18, he was an expert in Islamic law and in medicine.

His first appointment was that of physician to the emir, who owed him his recovery from a dangerous illness. Avicenna’s chief reward for this service was access to the royal library of the Samanids, well known patrons of scholarships and scholars.

He practiced medicine in Baghdad and published the Canon, codification of Greek and Arabic medicine. Translation of this work were appearing until the 17th century the last edition being printed in 1663.

Apart from his medical texts, he is best known for his attempts to synthesis Islamic theology and Greek philosophy.

He authored some 450 books on a wide range of subjects many of which concentrated on philosophy and medicine.

The Avicenna (980-1037)

The Book of Healing by Ibnu Sina

The Book of Healing by Ibnu Sina
Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (980 – 1037) was born in the neighborhood of Bukhara, in what is now modern Uzbekistan. By age of 10, Avicenna had already memorized The Quran, the holy book of Islam. By age 21, Avicenna was recognized as a philosopher, physician and legal expert. The breadth of his study which included grammar, law, logic, mathematic, natural philosophy, medicine and theology, is reflected in the list of his work, which includes no fewer than 242 titles.

The Book of Healing is often confused with the Canon of Medicine, because of the medical connotation of its title, which is meant to suggest however, only that philosophy constitutes and antidote against illness of false opinions. The Book of Healing divides into sections on logic, mathematics, physics and metaphysics and ends with an abridgement of itself, The Book of Salvation. The author openly declares his debt to al-Farabi for his understanding of metaphysics, but his exposition of it is a great deal more organized.

The Book of Healing also included detailed descriptions of natural phenomena such as rainbows and geological formations including description of igneous and sedimentary rocks and stalagmites, with references to Avicenna’s own childhood observations of Amu Darya River in Bukhara.

There is one special section on the “science of god’ in Book of Healing. This section was translated into Latin and circulated under the title The Metaphysic of Avicenna, thus guaranteeing it would be known to the masters of western scholasticism and exert an exceptional influence on them.

The Book of Healing, a vast eighteenth volume philosophical and scientific encyclopedia which has been described a “probably the largest work its kind ever written by one man”.
The Book of Healing by Ibnu Sina

The Canon of Medicine

The Canon of Medicine
The Canon of Medicine with original title is “Qanun" which translates to The Law of Medicine is a 14-volume Persian medical encyclopedia written by Avicenna and completed in 1025.Written in Arabic, the book was based on a combination of his own personal experience, medieval Islamic medicine, the writings of the Greek physician Galen, the Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka, and ancient Arabian and Persian medicine.

Canon of Medicine remained a medical authority up until the 18th century and early 19th century. It set the standards for medicine in Europe and the Islamic world, and is Avicenna's most renowned written work. The principles of medicine described by him ten centuries ago in this book, are still taught at UCLA and Yale University, among others, as part of the history of medicine.

Who is Avicenna? Avicenna was a physician-in-chief to the hospital at Bagdad. Widely learned in Greek scientific classics he exerted a great influence on contemporary thought. He was a court physician to a succession of caliphs, and this eminent position enhanced his authority. Besides medical writings he made significant contributions to geology in his theory of the formation of mountains.

About 100 years after Avicenna’s death Gerard of Cremona in Toledo translated the Qanun into Latin as the Canon of Medicine. This was later reworked and improved by Andrea Alpago (d. 1520), a physician and scholar. The improved version was published in Venice in 1527 and reprinted more than 30 times in the 15th and 16th centuries. There are more than 50 complete or partial copies of the Qanun, and manuscripts of the many later commentaries on it are even more numerous. It has been observed that probably no other medical work ever written has been so much studied.

Avicenna begins The Canon of Medicine with a definition of the science of medicine: Medicine is the science by which learning the various states of the human body in health and when not in health, and the means by which health is likely to be lost, and when lost, is likely to be restored. In other words, medicine is the art whereby health is conserved and the art whereby it is restored after being lost.

Avicenna insists that the human body cannot be restored to health unless the causes of both health and disease are determined. In categorizing the causes, he states that a complete knowledge may be, and should be obtained of the causes and antecedents of a disease, provided, of course, such causes exist. Sometimes these causes are obvious to the senses but at other times they may defy direct observation. In such circumstances, causes and antecedents have to be carefully inferred from the signs and symptoms of the disease. Hence, a description of the signs and symptoms of disease is also necessary.
The Canon of Medicine