Avicenna (ibn Sina)

Avicenna at a Glance

Full Name: Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina Known As: Avicenna in the Latin West; Ibn Sina in Arabic; the Prince of Physicians Born: Circa 980 AD, Afshana village near Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan) Died: June 21, 1037 AD, Hamadan, Persia (modern Iran) Age at Death: Approximately 57 years Nationality: Persian Languages: Arabic for scholarly works; Persian for poetry and some prose Fields: Medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, astronomy, physics, psychology Major Works: The Canon of Medicine (Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb), The Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa), The Book of Salvation (Kitab al-Najat) Known For: Synthesizing Greek, Islamic, and original medical and philosophical knowledge; the Canon of Medicine served as the standard medical textbook in European and Islamic universities from the 12th through the 17th century Philosophical School: Islamic Neoplatonism; Aristotelian peripatetic tradition adapted to Islamic theological framework Key Philosophical Contribution: The Flying Man thought experiment, a proof of the soul's self-awareness that anticipates Descartes' cogito by approximately 600 years Medical Legacy: Recognition of tuberculosis as contagious; quarantine procedures; approximately 760 medicinal substances catalogued; systematic clinical observation methods; contributions to psychiatry Influence: Shaped Islamic and European medicine, philosophy, and science for six centuries; influenced Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and the whole tradition of European Scholasticism Mausoleum: Hamadan, Iran, honored with a striking modern architectural monument

Introduction

In the long and distinguished history of human intellectual achievement, very few thinkers have exerted as sustained and as profound an influence as the Persian polymath Abu Ali ibn Sina, known to the Latin West as Avicenna and given the title the Prince of Physicians. Born around 980 AD in the village of Afshana near Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan, Avicenna combined extraordinary native intelligence with an almost superhuman capacity for sustained intellectual work to produce, in the course of a turbulent and peripatetic life, a body of scholarship that would shape the understanding of medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences in both the Islamic world and Christian Europe for more than six centuries.

His Canon of Medicine, a five-volume encyclopedic synthesis of all available medical knowledge completed around 1025 AD, was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and became the standard medical textbook in European universities from Paris and Bologna to Oxford and Salamanca, remaining on required reading lists at Montpellier and Louvain as late as the seventeenth century -- an extraordinary run of more than five hundred years as the authoritative reference in a discipline that did not lack for competing texts. In a very real sense, the medical education of generations of European and Islamic physicians, from the twelfth century through the early modern era, was shaped and defined by Avicenna's synthesis. The Canon told doctors what the body was made of, how it functioned, what went wrong with it in disease, what drugs existed to treat those diseases, and how those drugs should be compounded and administered. It provided, in one systematic work, the entire theoretical and practical framework of medieval medicine.

His philosophical masterwork, the Book of Healing (Kitab al-Shifa), was a comprehensive encyclopedia of logic, mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics that introduced Aristotelian philosophy -- as interpreted through the lens of Islamic theological and mystical thought -- to a European audience that would not otherwise have had ready access to it. The great Scholastic philosophers of medieval Europe, from Thomas Aquinas to Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, and Roger Bacon, read Avicenna in Latin translation and built their own philosophical systems in direct and often explicit engagement with his arguments. When the historian of philosophy surveys the intellectual genealogy of European Scholasticism -- the tradition of systematic philosophical theology that dominated European universities from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries -- Avicenna stands near its roots, as a figure whose work was so fundamental that the tradition would have been profoundly different without it.

Avicenna was not merely a synthesizer and transmitter of earlier knowledge, however. He was an original thinker of the first rank whose contributions to medicine, philosophy, and psychology went significantly beyond what he found in his Greek and Islamic predecessors. In medicine, he recognized the contagious nature of tuberculosis at a time when Galen's authority led most physicians to deny the possibility of person-to-person contagion. He developed systematic procedures for what we would now call quarantine. He understood that both water and soil could serve as vectors for the transmission of disease -- an insight anticipating the germ theory of disease by more than eight hundred years. He applied what we might now recognize as elements of clinical trial methodology to the testing of drugs, laying out principles for drug evaluation that would not be formalized as standard scientific practice until the modern era. And he made contributions to psychiatry so far ahead of his time that some of his clinical observations and treatment approaches would not be systematically rediscovered in the West until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.