According to Avicenna’s personal account of his life, as communicated in the records of his longtime pupil al-Jūzjānī, he read and memorized the entire Qurʾān by age 10. The tutor Nātilī instructed the youth in elementary logic, and, having soon surpassed his teacher, Avicenna took to studying the Hellenistic authors on his own. By age 16 Avicenna turned to medicine, a discipline over which he claimed “easy” mastery. When the sultan of Bukhara fell ill with an ailment that baffled the court physicians, Avicenna was called to his bedside and cured him. In gratitude, the sultan opened the royal Sāmānid library to him, a fortuitous benevolence that introduced Avicenna to a veritable cornucopia of science and philosophy.

Avicenna began his prodigious writing career at age 21. Some 240 extant titles bear his name. They cross numerous fields, including mathematics, geometry, astronomy, physics, metaphysics, philology, music, and poetry. Often caught up in the tempestuous political and religious strife of the era, Avicenna’s scholarship was unquestionably hampered by a need to remain on the move. At Eṣfahān, under ʿAlā al-Dawlah, he found the stability and security that had eluded him. If Avicenna could be said to have had any halcyon days, they occurred during his time at Eṣfahān, where he was insulated from political intrigues and could hold his own scholars’ court every Friday, discussing topics at will. In this salubrious climate, Avicenna completed Kitāb al-shifāʾ, wrote Dānish nāma-i ʿalāʾī (Book of Knowledge) and Kitāb al-najāt (Book of Salvation), and compiled new and more-accurate astronomical tables.

Influence in medicine

Despite a general assessment favouring al-Rāzī’s medical contributions, many physicians historically preferred Avicenna for his organization and clarity. Indeed, his influence over Europe’s great medical schools extended well into the early modern period. There The Canon of Medicine (Al-Qānūn fī al-ṭibb) became the preeminent source, rather than al-Rāzī’s Kitāb al-ḥāwī (Comprehensive Book).

Avicenna’s penchant for categorizing becomes immediately evident in the Canon, which is divided into five books. The first book contains four treatises, the first of which examines the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) in light of Greek physician Galen of Pergamum’s four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). The first treatise also includes anatomy. The second treatise examines etiology (cause) and symptoms, while the third covers hygiene, health and sickness, and death’s inevitability. The fourth treatise is a therapeutic nosology (classification of disease) and a general overview of regimens and dietary treatments. Book II of the Canon is a “Materia Medica,” Book III covers “Head-to-Toe Diseases,” Book IV examines “Diseases That Are Not Specific to Certain Organs” (fevers and other systemic and humoral pathologies), and Book V presents “Compound Drugs” (e.g., theriacs, mithridates, electuaries, and cathartics). Books II and V each offer important compendia of about 760 simple and compound drugs that elaborate upon Galen’s humoral pathology.

Unfortunately, Avicenna’s original clinical records, intended as an appendix to the Canon, were lost, and only an Arabic text has survived in a Roman publication of 1593. Yet, he obviously practiced Greek physician Hippocrates’ treatment of spinal deformities with reduction techniques, an approach that had been refined by Greek physician and surgeon Paul of Aegina. Reduction involved the use of pressure and traction to straighten or otherwise correct bone and joint deformities such as curvature of the spine. The techniques were not used again until French surgeon Jean-François Calot reintroduced the practice in 1896. Avicenna’s suggestion of wine as a wound dressing was commonly employed in medieval Europe. He also described a condition known as “Persian fire” (anthrax), correctly correlated the sweet taste of urine to diabetes, and described the guinea worm.

Avicenna’s influence extends into modern medical practice. Evidence-based medicine, for example, is often presented as a wholly contemporary phenomenon driven by the double-blind clinical trial. But, as medical historian Michael McVaugh pointed out, medieval physicians went to great pains to build their practices upon reliable evidence. Here, Avicenna played a leading role as a prominent figure within the Greco-Arabic literature that influenced such 13th-century physicians as Arnold of Villanova (c. 1235–1313), Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270–1330), and Nicholas of Poland (c. 1235–1316). It was Avicenna’s concept of a proprietas (a consistently effective remedy founded directly upon experience) that permitted the testing and confirmation of remedies within a context of rational causation. Avicenna, and to a lesser extent Rhazes, gave many prominent medieval healers a framework of medicine as an empirical science integral to what McVaugh called “a rational schema of nature.” This should not be assumed to have led medieval physicians to construct a modern nosology or to develop modern research protocols. However, it is equally ahistorical to dismiss the contributions of Avicenna, and the Greco-Arabic literature of which he was such a prominent part, to the construction of modalities of care that were fundamentally evidence-based.