Avicenna (c.980–c.1037,) fully Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Sīnā, was a Persian-born Islāmic polymath—an astronomer, chemist, ḥāfiẓ, logician, mathematician, poet, psychologist, physician, physicist, scientist, Sheikh, soldier, diplomat, and theologian.
Avicenna was one of the most significant thinkers of the Islāmic Golden Age, which dominated European medical thought from the late 12th to the 17th century. His philosophical system, inspired by Aristotle but in many ways closer to Neo-Platonism, was a significant influence on the development of 13th-century scholasticism.
Born in Afshana in the district of Bukhara in the Persianate Samanid Empire (in present-day Uzbekistan,) Avicenna was renowned for his precocious and prodigious learning. He became a physician to several sulṭāns while still in his teens, and for some time vizier in Hamadān.
Avicenna was one of the foremost interpreters of Aristotle to the Islāmic world and was the author of some 200 works on philosophy, medicine, geometry, astronomy, theology, philology, and art.
Avicenna is famous for his Kitāb al-shifāʾ (The Book of Healing; Latin: Sufficientiae,) a voluminous philosophical and scientific encyclopedia. This major work of medieval Muslim scholarship encompasses logic, the natural sciences, psychology, the quadrivium (geometry, astronomy, mathematics, and music) and metaphysics.
Avicenna is also celebrated for his Al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine,) a codification of Greco-Arabic medical thought. This vast medical encyclopedia is divided into five books dealing with the theory of medicine, simpler drugs, special pathology and therapeutics, widespread diseases, and pharmacopeia. It remained a required text in certain European medical schools until the mid-17th century and is influential even today in parts of Asia.
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Medicine considers the human body as to the means by which it is cured and by which it is driven away from health.
—Avicenna
The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes. Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health. And because health and sickness and their causes are sometimes manifest, and sometimes hidden and not to be comprehended except by the study of symptoms, we must also study the symptoms of health and disease. Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials. Of these causes there are four kinds: material, efficient, formal, and final.
—Avicenna
God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.
—Avicenna
An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.
—Avicenna
Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined.
—Avicenna
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