Avicenna
Ibn Sina wrote a medical encyclopaedia that was a standard text in European universities for six hundred years. He was born about 980 near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, in a house of officials with Ismaili sympathies, and by his own account had memorised the Quran at ten, exhausted his teachers by thirteen, and was practising medicine at sixteen. He read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it and then bought a commentary by al-Farabi from a bookstall for three dirhams, which he said opened it. His career was that of a court physician and administrator in a period of collapsing dynasties: service to Samanid, Buyid and Kakuyid rulers, several imprisonments, at least one flight in disguise, and long stretches of writing at night after a day of administration. The Canon of Medicine organised Greek and Arabic medicine into a system with an index, distinguished mediastinitis from pleurisy, described the contagious nature of tuberculosis, and set out rules for testing drugs that are close to a clinical trial. The Book of Healing is a philosophical encyclopaedia covering logic, physics, mathematics and metaphysics, and its central argument distinguishes essence from existence — everything except the necessary being has its existence added to what it is. That distinction went through Latin translation into Aquinas and shaped medieval European philosophy permanently. His floating man thought experiment argues that a person suspended in void with no sensation would still know that he exists. He died about 1037. The Canon reached Europe through a Latin translation made at Toledo in the twelfth century and was printed some sixty times before 1600. It was still being taught at Montpellier and Louvain in the seventeenth century, which is a longer run than any textbook has had since.
- Lived: 980 CE – 1037 CE
- Nationality: Persian
- Roles: scientist, philosopher
