Ibn Sina's ‘Canon of Medicine’

Ibn Sina was born near Bukhara around 980 — or, as Dimitri Gutas argues, some ten years earlier — and at seventeen became physician to the Samanid amir Nuh II. After the fall of the Samanids he served the Khwarazmshah at Gurganj and in 1012 set out westwards; at Jorjan (Gorgan), south-east of the Caspian, he met his lifelong pupil al-Juzjani and, by most accounts, wrote the first part of the Canon, though some place its beginning earlier, in Khwarazm. He went on with it at Rayy in the service of the Buyid Majd al-Dawla and from 1015 at Hamadan, where he was physician and vizier to the Buyid Shams al-Dawla; the first book was finished by 1014/15. The completion of the whole is usually dated to 1025; some authors put it earlier, around 1020, and others place it at Isfahan, where Ibn Sina served the Kakuyid ruler Ala al-Dawla from about 1024 until his death in 1037.

Book I sets out the general principles of medicine: the elements, humours and temperaments, anatomy, the causes and signs of disease, the preservation of health by regimen and diet, and treatment. Book II lists about 800 simple drugs, mostly of plant origin; Book III describes the diseases of particular organs from head to foot; Book IV deals with conditions affecting the whole body, such as fevers, poisons, wounds and fractures; Book V is a formulary of some 650 compound remedies. Like the earlier Arabic compendia of al-Razi and al-Majusi, the Canon rested on Galen, whose works had been translated in 9th-century Baghdad; but Ibn Sina ordered the material with unusual clarity, defined the place of medicine among the sciences and, where Galen and Aristotle disagreed, generally sided with Aristotle.

Gerard of Cremona's Latin translation, made at Toledo in the second half of the 12th century, turned the book into the Canon medicinae of the Latin West. It entered the university curriculum in the 14th century, eleven complete Latin editions were printed before 1500, and the Arabic text was printed in Rome in 1593. Most European universities dropped it from the syllabus in the second half of the 16th century, but at some it remained obligatory well into the 18th, and it is still an important text of Unani medicine. The earliest known copy of its fifth book is dated 1052, and William Osler called it "the most famous medical textbook ever written".