Avicenna

Ibn Sina — known in the West as Avicenna — was a Persian polymath born near Bukhara. By age eighteen he was a practicing physician; by his mid-thirties he had finished the first draft of the Qanun, the systematic medical encyclopedia that became the standard textbook of the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, of European universities from the 12th to the 17th centuries.

The Canon organizes medicine into five books: general principles, materia medica (single drugs), diseases of specific organs, general diseases, and compound remedies. Its second book alone catalogues nearly 800 single medicines — herbs, minerals, and animal substances — with temperament, dose, and indication.

For the Living Library, the Canon is our anchor for classical Persian views on temperament (mizāj), the six essentials of daily life (sett-e ḍarūrīyya), and the traditional properties of individual herbs. We cite Avicenna as tradition, not as clinical proof; where modern evidence agrees or disagrees, we say so.