Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and The Canon of Medicine

The boys of Bukhara would have known him as the prodigy who could not be out-argued. By his own account, set down later in one of the earliest autobiographies in the Islamic tradition, Ibn Sina had memorised the Quran by the age of ten and worn out his teachers not long after. By eighteen he had read his way through the available philosophy, medicine and mathematics and decided there was little left for anyone to teach him. The arrogance would be hard to forgive if the next sixty years had not largely justified it.

A physician before he could grow a beard

Ibn Sina, known in Latin Europe as Avicenna, lived from 980 to 1037 in the lands of what is now Uzbekistan, Iran and the regions around them. His medical reputation arrived early. As a teenager he was summoned to treat the Samanid ruler of Bukhara, and his reward was not gold but the run of the royal library, a collection so deep that he later said he had read books in it that almost no one else knew existed. The library burned soon after, and rivals accused him of starting the fire to keep its contents to himself, a charge he denied.

The Canon of Medicine

His enduring monument is the Canon of Medicine, the Qanun fi al-Tibb, a vast and orderly synthesis of Greek, Roman and Islamic medical knowledge arranged so that a physician could actually find what he needed. It covered anatomy, the causes and symptoms of disease, the properties of some seven hundred and sixty drugs, and rules of treatment. Its insistence on testing remedies methodically, and its account of contagious disease and the use of quarantine, kept it useful long after much of its underlying theory had dated.

Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, the Canon became the standard medical textbook in European universities such as Montpellier and Padua, and it was still being printed and taught into the seventeenth century. A single book outlived every dynasty that paid for its author's bread.

The other career

Medicine was, in a sense, his day job. Ibn Sina's deeper ambition was philosophy, and his Book of Healing, which despite the title is barely about medicine at all, was an encyclopaedia of logic, mathematics, physics and metaphysics. In it he reworked Aristotle into a system of his own, advancing arguments about the nature of existence and the soul that Christian and Jewish thinkers would spend the next four centuries wrestling with. Thomas Aquinas argued with him by name.

A life on the move

None of this was done in scholarly calm. Ibn Sina served as physician and minister to a run of unstable courts, was imprisoned at least once, fled in disguise more than once, and wrote much of his work at night or on the road between patrons whose fortunes kept collapsing under him. He died in his late fifties, worn out, near Hamadan. He had compressed several ordinary careers into one anxious, brilliant lifetime.

The Ibn Sina print is part of the Riwayah Golden Age collection. You can view the print.

Ibn Sina worked at the height of that civilisation of inherited and improved knowledge. For the wider context, see what the Islamic Golden Age actually was.