Avicenna's medical textbook was still taught in Europe six centuries later
Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was a royal physician at 17, a vizier, a fugitive and a prisoner. Along the way he wrote The Canon of Medicine, which European universities kept using as late as 1650, and a philosophical encyclopedia he drafted at a pace of 50 pages a day.
He was born around 980 in Afshana, a village near Bukhara, capital of the Samanid realm, into a Persian family; his father was a local official. By 10 he had memorised the Quran. An Indian greengrocer taught him arithmetic, a Hanafi jurist taught him law, and the philosopher al-Natili read logic with him. At 17 he was appointed physician to the Samanid ruler Nuh II, and Bukhara, which then rivalled Baghdad as a cultural capital, gave him access to rich libraries.
Politics kept him moving. The Samanid state collapsed in 999, and he went, as he put it, out of necessity, first to Gurganj in Khwarazm, a hub of scholars, and later westward through Khurasan. In Ray he treated the Buyid prince Majd al-Dawla for melancholia and finished the Canon. In Hamadan he was forced to become vizier to Shams al-Dawla, then went into hiding after the ruler's death in 1021. Suspected of secret dealings with a rival court, he was jailed for four months in the fortress of Fardajan until Hamadan changed hands.
Of roughly 450 works attributed to him, about 240 survive, including some 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine. He wrote mostly in Arabic but also in Persian, and composed poetry in both, alongside works on astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, mathematics and theology. The Book of Healing is a vast scientific and philosophical encyclopedia, completed while he hid in a patron's house.
His method blended observation, philosophical argument and logic, especially in medicine. As a philosopher he belonged to the Peripatetic school built on Aristotle and is counted among its greatest Muslim champions. He could be combative: a public debate in Hamadan in 1015 with Abu'l-Qasim al-Kirmani ended with each accusing the other of ignorance or rudeness. He died in 1037 and is often called the father of early modern medicine.
Source: Avicenna
