Free You Could Look It Up by Jack Lynch

written shortly after his death by his friend and disciple al-Juzjani. We know, for instance, that he was born in Afshana, the son of a high-ranking civil servant. Afshana was near the Persian region of Bukhara, the capital of the Persian Samanid dynasty and a great center of learning in the Islamic world. We know, too, that he was mostly self-educated. His father provided him with tutors, but he soon left them behind. By the time he was ten he had memorized the Qur’an; by the age of sixteen, he had learned everything his tutors had to teach him.
    Having finished with the course of instruction his teachers had for him, he turned his attention to natural science, metaphysics, and medical theory. He studied Greek logic and mathematics with particular interest. He read Plato, Galen, the Stoics, Ptolemy’s Almagest , and Euclid’s Elements , as well as Arabic philosophers such as al-Farabi and Abu Abdallah al-Natili. Most of all, though, he read Aristotle, and especially the Metaphysics . At last he found something that challenged him.Having learned the Greek language, he read the original text, trying to make sense of it by reading an Arabic commentary by al-Farabi. He read the book forty times, attempting over and over to plumb its depths. In the words of philosophy professor Coeli Fitzpatrick, “Avicenna’s persistence and self-discipline in learning were legendary.” 6
    TITLE: Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb
    COMPILER: Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina ( c. 980–1037)
    ORGANIZATION: Book 1, humoral theory; book 2, “simples” and method; books 3–4, pathology; book 5, compounding medicines
    PUBLISHED: 1025
    VOLUMES: 14
    TOTAL WORDS: 1 million
    Writings on medicine were always among those he read most attentively. Even as a teenager he claimed to have read every medical book available in late tenth-century Persia. From theory he turned to practice. Avicenna began treating the ill, and he rapidly developed a reputation as a physician. This reputation reached the very top of the social hierarchy in 997, when Nuh ibn Mansur, Sultan of Bukhara, appointed him one of his personal physicians. Avicenna was just sixteen or seventeen. The time in Mansur’s service was a revelation: Avicenna now had access to the whole of the sultan’s library. The voracious reader made his way through the entire collection by the time he was eighteen. Later in life he reflected, “I now know the same amount as then but more maturely and deeply; otherwise the truth of learning and knowledge is the same.” 7 In his own writings, he combined Greek and Islamic thought, and he organized classical knowledge into a system that made sense in a Muslim context.
    Avicenna wrote two major books on medicine. One, the Kitab al-Shifa , or Book of Healing , is a wide-ranging meditation on the health of the mind. The other, Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb , or The Canon of Medicine , is much more encyclopedic in its organization. Its fourteen volumes andmore than a million words, densely packed with information, were compiled at Isfahan. It is an avowedly eclectic book, combining Galenic medicine, from second-century Greece, with older Aristotelian science and modern Islamic medicine. Avicenna’s interest in reconciling Greek and Arabic thought shows up even in his title: the Arabic word qanun is borrowed from the Greek kanon ‘measuring rod’, meaning “rule” or “standard.” But Avicenna drew from even more distant sources, including Indian medical theory and the Zhubing Yuanhuo Lun , an early seventh-century Chinese medical work. He has been praised for his clarity, his arrangement of information for maximal usefulness, and his ability to express complicated matters in the most concise way possible.
    “Medicine,” Avicenna wrote in his preface, “is a science from which one learns the status of the human body with respect to what is healthy and what is not, in order to preserve good health when it exists and restore it