At a glance
Era 3- Dates
- 980-1037 CE
- Who
- Physician and philosopher whose Canon of Medicine was taught for centuries
- Era
- The Abbasids & the Golden Age
ProfileIbn Sina
Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina was born near Bukhara in 980. He is said to have memorised the Quran by the age of ten and to have mastered medicine as a teenager. While still young he cured the Samanid ruler of Bukhara and was given the run of the royal library.
He spent most of his life moving between the courts of Iran, working as a physician and sometimes as a minister, and writing constantly, often at night. His great medical work, al-Qanun fi'l-Tibb, the Canon of Medicine, gathered the medical knowledge of his time in an ordered system. Translated into Latin, it was a standard textbook in European universities for about five hundred years. His Kitab al-Shifa, the Book of Healing, covered logic, natural science, mathematics and philosophy.
He died in Hamadan in 1037. Europeans knew him as Avicenna.
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