His Canon of Medicine taught Europe's doctors for six centuries — written by a prodigy who started at sixteen.
Ibn Sina (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna, was a Persian polymath whose Canon of Medicine — a five-volume encyclopedia of anatomy, disease, drugs and treatment — remained the standard medical textbook in European universities into the 17th century, six hundred years after it was written.
A child prodigy born near Bukhara, he had memorized the Quran by ten and was a practicing physician by sixteen; at eighteen he was summoned to treat the Samanid ruler. He went on to write some 200 works on medicine, philosophy, astronomy and logic.
Ibn Sina was born in 980 in Afshana, near Bukhara in present-day Uzbekistan, then a glittering Samanid capital. Tutors could barely keep up: by ten he knew the Quran by heart, by fourteen he had outgrown his teachers, and at sixteen he was treating patients. Curing the emir Nuh ibn Mansur of an illness that had baffled court physicians opened the royal library to him.
He lived a restless life of courts and exiles across Persia — serving viziers, fleeing princes, writing at night after days of administration. He is said to have completed the Canon while on the run, composing from memory.
The 'al-Qanun fi al-Tibb' — The Canon of Medicine — arranged all medical knowledge into five books: general principles and anatomy; simple drugs; diseases organ by organ; fevers, poisons and surgery; and compound remedies. It described contagious diseases, argued for quarantine of the sick, and laid down rules for testing drugs that read like an early protocol for clinical trials.
Translated into Latin in the 12th century, it was printed in dozens of editions and taught at Montpellier, Louvain and Padua well into the 1600s. For six centuries, to study medicine in Europe was to study Ibn Sina.
His 'Kitab al-Shifa' — The Book of Healing — was not about medicine at all but a vast work of logic, physics, mathematics and metaphysics, arguing that philosophy and faith need not quarrel. It shaped Islamic philosophy and, in Latin translation, the scholastic debates of medieval Europe.
He died in 1037 in Hamadan, in present-day Iran, reportedly of a stomach ailment he had treated in others. His tomb there is still a place of pilgrimage.
