Avicenna

Early life and formation

Ibn Sina was born in 980 in Afshona, near Bukhara, in the region then governed by the Samanid dynasty (present-day Uzbekistan). He showed exceptional intellectual ability from early childhood; by ten he had memorised the Quran and a substantial body of poetry, and by his mid-teens he had progressed beyond his teachers in logic and the natural sciences. He taught himself medicine at sixteen and was treating patients by seventeen.

The Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur was reportedly cured of an illness by the young Ibn Sina, and in gratitude granted him access to the royal library at Bukhara — a collection he later described as unlike anything he had encountered before or after. He read widely across it before the library was destroyed by fire, an event he recorded with evident regret.

Across the courts of Iran

The political instability that followed the collapse of Samanid power in 999 meant that Ibn Sina spent much of his adult life moving between the courts of various Iranian rulers, serving as court physician, vizier, and administrative official while continuing to write. He served in Gurganj, Gorgan, Rayy, Hamadan, and Isfahan, among other cities. At Hamadan he was twice appointed vizier under Shams al-Dawla, an appointment he combined — implausibly, by any account — with continued philosophical writing. He is said to have dictated sections of his encyclopaedic philosophical work Kitab al-Shifa to secretaries while on horseback during military campaigns.

He died on 18 June 1037 in Hamadan, aged around fifty-seven, reportedly from a colic condition. The speed of his death surprised his contemporaries; one account notes that he treated his own final illness with repeated self-prescribed medications to such an extreme that his body gave out.

The Canon of Medicine

The Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb — Canon of Medicine — is a systematic encyclopaedia of medicine in five books, drawing on and synthesising the medical traditions of Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscorides alongside Ibn Sina's own clinical observations. The first book covers general principles of medicine and the theory of the four humours. The second is a pharmacopoeia of simple drugs. The third and fourth address specific diseases by organ system, and the fifth covers compound drugs.

The Canon was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and became a standard university medical text in Europe. It remained on the curriculum at Montpellier and Louvain into the seventeenth century. Its influence on both Islamic and European medicine was unparalleled: it provided a common theoretical framework that physicians on both sides of the Mediterranean argued from and against for generations.

Philosophy and the floating man

Ibn Sina's philosophical work was no less significant than his medicine. His Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing) is a philosophical encyclopaedia covering logic, the natural sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics. He developed an influential proof for the existence of God through the concept of necessary existence — a necessary being that grounds all contingent existence — and made substantial contributions to the philosophy of the soul.

His famous "floating man" thought experiment prefigures later discussions of self-awareness and the mind-body problem: he asks a reader to imagine a person created in mid-air, with no sensory contact with the external world. That person, Ibn Sina argues, would still be aware of their own existence — suggesting that self-awareness is not derived from bodily sensation.