Medicine · Philosophy · 1025

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)

The Persian polymath who set the whole of medicine in a single order.

980–1037Afshana, nr Bukhara, 980Hamadan, 1037

Ibn Sīnā, known to the Latin West as Avicenna, composed in his Canon of Medicine a synthesis so complete that it served as the standard medical text from Bukhara to Bologna for six hundred years.

Physician, philosopher and astronomer, he gathered the Greek inheritance, the Arabic commentators and his own clinical observation into five ordered books — a structure that taught Europe how to think about the body.