Ibn Sina completes the Canon of Medicine

Date

c. 1025 CE

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Persia and Central Asia

Era

Post-Classical / Medieval

Significance

Around 1025 the Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna, c. 980–1037) completed al-Qanun fi al-tibb, the Canon of Medicine, a five-book encyclopedia that synthesised Greek, Roman, Persian and Indian medical traditions with his own philosophical framework and clinical observations.

The work systematised the principles of medicine, catalogued some 800 drugs in its materia medica, and treated pathology, the diseases of the body and pharmacological formulary in rigorous order. Its emphasis on logical organisation, causation and testing of remedies made it a model of medical reasoning. Translated from Arabic into Latin at Toledo in the twelfth century, the Canon became the standard medical textbook in European universities and remained in use into the early modern period, dominating teaching for some six centuries. Together with his philosophical masterwork the Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing), the Canon established Ibn Sina as one of the most influential thinkers of the medieval world. His career, spanning Persia and Central Asia, epitomised the integration of medicine, philosophy and natural science that characterised the Islamic Golden Age and profoundly shaped both Islamic and Western intellectual history.

Empires active in c. 1025 CE

• Abbasid Caliphate
  750 CE – 1258 CE
• Song Dynasty
  960 CE – 1279 CE
• Byzantine Empire
  330 CE – 1453 CE
• Kanem-Bornu Empire
  700 CE – 1900 CE
• Liao Dynasty (Khitan Empire)
  916 CE – 1125 CE
• Fatimid Caliphate
  909 CE – 1171 CE

Related science, technology & invention events

• Ibn al-Haytham Completes the Book of Optics
  c. 1021 CE
• Al-Biruni Measures the Earth's Radius
  c. 1017 CE
• Bi Sheng invents movable-type printing in Song China
  c. 1040–1048 CE
• Wujing Zongyao records the first gunpowder formulas
  1044 CE
• Al-Zahrawi completes the Kitab al-Tasrif, foundational surgical encyclopedia
  c. 1000 CE
• Legendary origin of smallpox variolation (inoculation) in East Asia
  c. 1000 CE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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