Avicenna's Canon of Medicine: A Timeless Medical Masterpiece

The "Canon of Medicine," originally titled "Qanun," is a seminal 14-volume Persian medical encyclopedia written by Avicenna and completed in 1025. This monumental work, composed in Arabic, reflects Avicenna's synthesis of his extensive personal experience, medieval Islamic medical practices, and the knowledge derived from the writings of Greek physician Galen, Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka, as well as ancient Arabian and Persian medical traditions.

Avicenna’s "Canon of Medicine" remained an authoritative text in the medical world until the 18th and early 19th centuries. It set rigorous standards for medical practice both in Europe and the Islamic world, marking it as Avicenna's most renowned contribution to the field. The book's principles are so foundational that they continue to be taught today in the history of medicine courses at prestigious institutions like UCLA and Yale University.

Avicenna begins the "Canon of Medicine" with a precise definition of the science of medicine: it is the discipline concerned with understanding the various states of the human body in both health and illness, and determining the methods by which health can be maintained and restored. In essence, medicine is the art of preserving health and restoring it when lost. This holistic approach underscored the preventive and curative aspects of medicine, emphasizing the importance of balance and harmony in the body.

The "Canon of Medicine" is divided into five books, covering basic medical principles, simple drugs and materia medica, diseases affecting specific organs, systemic diseases and general conditions, and compound drugs. Each section systematically details the causes, symptoms, and treatments of various ailments, reflecting Avicenna's encyclopedic knowledge and systematic approach to medicine.

Avicenna's work not only influenced medical practice but also shaped the philosophical and scientific discourse of the medieval world. His integration of empirical observation with theoretical knowledge laid the groundwork for modern medical science, and his emphasis on ethical medical practice continues to resonate in contemporary medical education. Thus, the "Canon of Medicine" remains a testament to Avicenna's enduring legacy in the field of medicine.
Avicenna's Canon of Medicine: A Timeless Medical Masterpiece

Book of Physiological Elements of the Human Body

The Swiss physician-naturalist Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) was perhaps the most prolific physiologist of the eighteenth century.

A student of Hermann Boerhaave at Leiden, Haller was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Gottingen in 1737, helping to shape it into a leasing medical institution.

In his Physiological Elements of the Human Body (1757-66), he redefined two previous known properties of life: sensibility (perception) and irritability (response). All living beings -plants and animals were said to posses both.

Sensation, according to Haller, arises when an impression of some sensible object, which has impinged on a nerve of the human body, arrives in the brain, through that nerve’s connection to the brain, so that it is thus represented to the soul.

 Only nerves, he held, were sensitive; consequently, parts without nervous involvement like tendons, should feel no pain when pricked.

Von Haller based his conclusions on anatomical observations and the conducted animal experiments. He followed a conventional mechanistic approach which postulated God as the creator and first mover in a universe which, once started, ran according to mechanical laws.
Book of Physiological Elements of the Human Body

Arab Muslim in Sicily and Southern Italy

Medieval Italy’s earliest claim to prominence in the history of medicine comes from the southern half of the peninsula. There, from the mid-eleventh to the thirteenth century an unprecedented explosion in medical activity took place.

When the Muslim power (827-884) had their rule over Sicily and Southern part of Italy; Arabic medical doctrine infused with Western European culture until its existence.

Because the Muslims absorbed and cherished the great heritage from classical civilization, they were able to transmit its benefits along with much that they themselves had created to the West.

The advent of Constantinus Africanus is the period of greatest literary activity of the school Salerno.

The main source of Anatomical knowledge was Constantine’s translation of Al-Maleki (Royal book) written by Hay Ben Abbas, a Persian magnus, who was the author that treatise on matters medical.

Constantinus Africanus was a physician of the eleventh century and died before 19098/1099. Constantinus Africanus translated it onto Latin (1070-80) and later another translation was made by Stephen of Antioch.

The last of the Sicilian translators was the Jewish doctor Faraj ibn Salim, who translated a great medical work of al-Razi, the Rhases of the medieval West into Latin for the Angevin King Charles I.

In the eleventh and twelve centuries, the Muslims lost Sicily and most of Spain to Christian knights, and European crusaders carved it kingdoms on the Near East.
Arab Muslim in Sicily and Southern Italy

Vagbhata: author of Compendium in the Heart of Medicine

Indian medicine emerges from the dense cloud of mythology into the light of history with Charaka, Susruta, Vagbhata often addressed as the Vriddha-traya or the venerable triad.

Vagbhata is regarded as the author of one of the three major medical source-books in India; he is classed with Charaka and Susruta. He is the most celebrated author in the history of medicine.

It was said that he lived in the sixth century; he is in any case earlier than the tenth century.

Vagbhata, son of Simhaguota was named after his grandfather, the great physician Vagbhata: he hailed from the Sindhu country.

He studied medicine under his own father and later under a Buddhist mendicant and physician named Avalokia.

The most common used text of Vagbhata is the Astan'gahrdayasamhita (Compendium in the Heart of Medicine) which is considered the greatest synthesis on Ayurveda ever produced.

The work is quoted in the Firdaws al-Hikma or Paradise of Wisdom composed in AD 850 by the Persian physician Ali Ibn Sahl Rabban at Tabari who gives a very complex summary of the Ayurvedic doctrines.

Vagbhata was the first author who mentioned the concept of medical astrology in his writings. He wrote that the course of illnesses.
Vagbhata: author of Compendium in the Heart of Medicine

Sushruta Samhita of Indian medicine

The earliest known Indian civilization emerged around 2500 BC in the Indus River Valley. Medicine was very advance in ancient India.

Much of current knowledge about ancient Hindu medicine comes from two collections of medical writings.

One, the Sushruta Samhita, was written by a surgeon name Sushruta. The other, the Charaka Samhita, was written by a physician named Charaka.

The Sushruta Samhita appeared during the first millennium BC.

Sushruta is called the ‘father of plastic surgery’. Sushruta was an ingenious court physician in Guptan Imperial times, used Caesarian section for difficulty deliveries. He was an expert in removing stones form the kidneys and the bladder, treating fractures and performing eye operations to remove cataract.

Sushruta Samhita contains 184 chapters and description of 1120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, 64 preparations from mineral sources and 57 preparations based on animal sources.

It is India’s first medical text to include surgery, with two chapters in surgical instruments and one on modes of operation.

The medical works of Sushruta and also Charaka were translated into the Arabic language during the Abbasid Caliphate. These Arabic works made their way into Europe via intermediaries.
Sushruta Samhita of Indian medicine

Charaka-Samhita

Ayurveda took its final form in the early centuries of the Common Era, which saw the composition of the two seminal works on Indian medicine, Charaka-Samhita and Sushruta-Samhita

Charaka, well known as the Father of Medicine, has written the great book Charaka-Samhita.

Charaka lived around the first century. He was the court physician of the first century Kushana emperor Kanishka. He travelled continually and reached the patients wherever they were. Due to nobody know where he came from, he became famous as ‘the wandering physician’ or Charaka.

The Charaka-Samhita contains several chronological layers.  The main body of the text presents itself as containing knowledge received by Agnivesha from his teacher, a sage named Atreya.

It seems that the medical system described in the work was known as the system of Agnivesha and that Charaka simply edited Agnivesha’s text.

Later on, in the 4th century A.D, a scholar by name Dridhabala again edited it.

Written partly in prose and partly in verse, Charka-Samhita has 120 chapters arranged into eight sections. The topics dealt with therein are of medical, social and philosophical importance.
Charaka-Samhita 

The Collection (Al-Tasrif) by Albucasis

The most famous professor in Cordoba was Albucasis (936-1013), who wrote the only textbook in Arabic that treated surgery as a separate subject. This is the last of his thirty-chapter medical treatise, termed The Collection. It is the Al-Tasrif.

Albucasis is the Latinized name of the Hispano-Arabic physician-surgeon Abu Al-Qasim al-Zahrawi. He was born in Muslim Spain in El-Zahra, a little village near Cordoba, in the year 936. He became an important member of the Cordovan center of Islam and was highly esteemed as a physician and as a very able surgeon.

He was an active practitioner who was said to have left his doors open day and night and whose courtyard was reputed to have been perennially overflowing with the poor patients for whom he cared as a charitable obligation.

In his introduction, Albucasis complained that surgery had almost completely disappeared as a specialty in Spain. Proficient surgeons could no longer be found as a result of the absence of anatomical knowledge; dissection indeed was prohibited.

Al-Tasrif was completed in AD 1000 and reflected Albucasis’s nearly 50 years of study and practice.

One feature of this book is the large number of illustrations of surgical instruments which, together with the descriptive text, serve to clarify the operative techniques he described.

The volume of the Al-Tasrif was dedicated to surgery and was divided into three parts: first part, the use of cautery: second part; lithotomy, wound care and amputation for gangrene and the third with fractures and dislocation, including an excellent description of paralysis from spinal trauma.

The book was translated into Latin in the 12th century by Gerard of Cremona, and became a work of central value to surgery in Western Europe during the Middle Ages.
The Collection (Al-Tasrif) by Albucasis

Ibn Juljul - Andalusian author

Ibn Juljul al-Andalusi, Sylayman ibn Hasan was born in Cordoba in AD 943. He died ca, 994.

He studied medicine with a gorup of Hellenists presided over  by Hasday ibn Shaprut, a Jewish physician and vizier of the Caliph Abd Al-Rahman II. Ibn Juljul later became medical advisor of the Caliph Hisham II (976-1009).

Ibn Juljul is the author of Ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ w’al-hukamā’ (Generations of physicians and Wise Men), the oldest extant summary in Arabic on the history of medicine, after Ishaq ibn Hunayn’s  Ta’rij al-atibba (History of the Physician)

In Ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ w’al-hukamā’ Ibn Juljuul enumerates medical doctors practicing during the reigns of Muhammad and Abd al-Rahman II.

These include a monk named Jawad, famed for his medicines and potions; Khalid Ibn Yazid Ruman, similarly reputed for his botanical drugs and Ibn Maluka, a Cordoban surgeon and bleeder who had thirty chairs for patients set up at the door of his house.

It contains fifty-seven biographies grouped into nine generations; thirty-one of them concern Asian authors and the rest refer to African and Andalusian scholars.

A number of these are Christians, whose main medical manual is a world known as ‘The Aphorisms’ of which an updated version in five books was produced by the Muslim doctor Yahya b. Imam.

Ibn Juljul mentioned several Christian physicians, whom he said were the most eminent medical men in al-Andalus until the middle of the ninth century, when medical texts arrived from the east and Christian learning became obsolete.

Ibn Juljul also wrote Tafsir asma al-adwiya al-mufradat min kitab diyusquridis (An Explanation of the names of Simple Drugs in the book of Dioscorides).

Ibn Juljul has explained the terms for simple remedies in the work of Dioscorides from ‘Ain Zarbah and clarified their hidden meaning.
Ibn Juljul - Andalusian author

Book of Optics (Opticae Thesaurus)

Book of Optics (Opticae Thesaurus)
Book of Optics or Kitab al-Manazir, was written by Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham in year of 1101 to 1021 while under house arrest in Cairo. Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham was regarded as the father of Modern Optics and known as Alhacen or Al-Hazen since Middle Ages. Al-Hazen was an expert and a serious researcher in philosophy, physics and mathematics. He is considered the most important researcher in optics between antiquity and the seventh century. He made a significant contribution to understanding of the visual process and systemically investigated the optical properties of air.

In the book Al-Hazen correctly explained and proved modern intromission theory of vision. He recognized for his experimentation on optics, including experiment on lenses, mirror, refraction, reflection and the dispersion of light into its constituent colors. He studied binocular vision and the Moon illusion, described the finite speed of light, and argued that it is made of particles traveling in straight lines. Due to his formulation of a modern quantitative and empirical approach to physics and science, he is considered the pioneer of the modern scientific method and the originator of the experimental nature of physics and science.

In his Kitab al-Manazir, Al-Hazen asserted that optics is a synthetic branch of inquiry that combines mathematical and physical consideration. This not only a new doctrine of vision, but also a new methodology. Al-Hazen was led to formulate problems which either would not have made sense from the stand point of the visual-ray theory or had been ignored by philosophers aiming primarily to give an account of what vision rather than an explanation of how to take place.

For reason that are not entirely clear, the Kitab al-Manazir seems to have been virtually unknown in the Islamic world until the end of the thirteenth century. Only then did the Arabic text receive the attention it deserved in the form of a critical commentary written in Arabic by the Persian Kamal al-Din al-Farisi. The Book of Optics was translated into Latin, and had much influence especially on and through Roger Bacon.
Book of Optics (Opticae Thesaurus)

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

Kitab al-Tasrif by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi

Kitab al-Tasrif by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi
Kitab al-Tasrif is an encyclopedia on medicine and surgery. It was written and completed in year 1000 AD by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi.

Abu al-Qasim was known as a father of modern surgery. He was born at Medinat al-Zahra near Cordoba on 936 A.D and died in 1013 AD. He descended from Ansar tribe of Arabia who had settled earlier in Spain. Kitab Al-Tasrif was his outstanding contribution in medicine.

Kitab al-Tasrif known also known as ‘Concessio ei data qui componere haud valet’ in Europe and it’s in 30 volume work covering anatomy, diseases, nutrition, surgery, medicine, orthopedic, ophthalmology and pharmacology. Abu al-Qasim also wrote the importance of doctor-patient relationship.

In his last and the largest volume of Al-Tasrif was nothing less than the greatest achievement of medieval surgery. It was the first independent surgical treatise ever written in detail. It included many pictures of surgical instruments, most invented by Abu Al-Qasim himself, and explanations of their use.

He was the first medical author to provide illustrations of instruments used in surgery. His treatise of surgery contains approximately 200 such drawings ranging from a tongue depressor and a tooth extractor to a catheter and elaborate obstetric device. He is a great surgeon in medieval Islam and also a great educationist based on his substantial section in the Al-Tasrif to child education and behavior table etiquette school curriculum and academic specialization.

It was translated to Latin by Gerald of Cremona in 12th century. The last edition was that of John Channing in Oxford (1778) this contains both the original Arabic text and its Latin translation on alternative pages.
Kitab al-Tasrif by Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi

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