In the Canon, Avicenna introduced diagnoses and treatments for illnesses unknown to the Greeks, being the first doctor to describe meningitis. A doctor visits a patient in a 14th-century Persian miniature. This was supplemented by Avicenna’s extensive medical experiences. There are also elements of ancient Persian, Mesopotamian and Indian medicine. Drawing of viscera, Avicenna’s ‘Qanun fi al-Tibb’ (Canon of Medicine) Welcome Imagesįour centuries of trying to prove God’s existence A medical pioneerĪvicenna’s Canon brilliantly synthesises Islamic medicine with that of Hippocrates (460 – 370 BC) and Galen (129 – 200 AD). Book of HealingĪvicenna’s Kitāb al-shifā, The Book of Healing, was as influential in Latin as his medical Canon.ĭivided into sections covering logic, science, mathematics and metaphysics, it produced highly influential theses on the distinction between essence and existence and the famous Flying Man thought experiment, which aims to establish how the soul is innately aware of itself. Aquinas also sought to refute some of Avicenna’s positions such as that which argued the world was eternal. Thomas Aquinas’s writings feature hundreds of quotations from Avicenna regarding issues such as God’s providence.
This was a chapter in the story of large-scale transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world to Europe.įrom the 12th century on, Avicenna shaped the thought of major European medieval thinkers. A Latin commentary on Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine by Italian physician Gentilis de Fulgineo, 1477. They then played a key role in the Arabic to Latin translation movement that brought Aristotle’s philosophy back, in a highly enriched manner, into Western thought. His work was a virtuosic kind of encylopedism, gathering the various traditions of Greek late antiquity, the early Islamic period and Iranian civilisation into one rational knowledge system covering all of reality.Īvicenna’s texts were forged out of the colossal Graeco-Arabic translation movement that took place in medieval Baghdad. Some of these texts he wrote while on horseback, travelling from one city to another! These cover logic, natural philosophy, cosmology, metaphysics, psychology, geology, and more. One estimate of his body of work counts 132 texts. Avicenna was prodigious from youth, claiming in his autobiography to have mastered all known philosophy by 18.Īvicenna’s output was extraordinarily prolific. He was born Abdallāh ibn Sīnā in 980AD in Bukhara, (present day Uzbekistan, then part of the Iranian Samanid empire). He is regarded by some as the greatest medieval thinker.Įxplainer: what Western civilisation owes to Islamic cultures Maverick and prodigious Avicenna’s birthplace, Bukhara. Uniquely, Avicenna is the rare philosopher who became as influential on a foreign philosophical culture as his own. He produced an early version of the germ theory of disease in the Canon where he also advocated quarantine to control the transmission of contagious diseases. NOVA Medical School, Lisbon.Īvicenna’s Canon established a tradition of scientific experimentation in physiology without which modern medicine as we know it would be inconceivable.įor example, his use of scientific principles to test the safety and effectiveness of medications forms the basis of contemporary pharmacology and clinical trials.Īvicenna has been in the news recently due to his work on contagions. ‘Arabic Medicine’, 1907, by Veloso Salgado. He was known to the Latin West as Avicenna.Īvicenna’s Canon of medicine, first translated from Arabic into Latin during the 12th century, was the most important medical reference book in the West until the 17th century, introducing technical medical terminology used for centuries afterwards. Ibn Sina was an 11th century Persian philosopher, physician, pharmacologist, scientist and poet, who exerted a profound impact on philosophy and medicine in Europe and the Islamic world. The doctors, unable to do anything for him, were forced to send for a young man named Ibn Sina, who was already renowned, despite his very young age, for his vast knowledge. Over a thousand years ago, Nuh ibn Mansur, the reigning prince of the medieval city of Bukhara, fell badly ill.
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