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What in a Name
Avicenna is the Father
of the Modern Medicine
Avicenna was born in 980 A.D. near Bokhara, an ancient center of culture and learning in Persia.
As a child, Avicenna showed a prodigious intellect. By age ten, he had committed the entire Koran to memory. While still in his teens, Avicenna had learned all there was to learn from the scholars of Bokhara, and had mastered the art of medicine.
Avicenna penned hundreds of works on just about every area of knowledge - physics, mathematics, economics, chemistry, natural history, religion, philosophy, music and, of course, medicine.
Two works are the most famous: The first is The Book of Healing. In it, Avicenna relates the principles of medicine to those of other sciences. According to Avicenna, any diagnosis of an illness was faulty and incomplete unless all aspects of the patient's life had been taken into consideration.
A page from Avicenna's
Canon of Medicine
Avicenna's most famous and influential work is his monumental treatise in five volumes — The Canon of Medicine. Encyclopedia Britannica has called it the single most important book in the history of medicine, East or West. For centuries, Avicenna's Canonwas a standard textbook in many European medical schools. Even today, it is the standard reference manual for practitioners of Unani Medicine.
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