Puzzle No. 87: When?

Around 1025 the Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna, c. 980 to 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.

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