Ibn Sina (Avicenna) - doctor of doctors





Abdullah, an adherent of the Ismaili sect, was from
Balkh
and his mother from a village near Bukhara.

In any age
Ibn Sina, known in the
West as Avicenna, would have been a giant among giants.
He displayed
exceptional intellectual prowess as a child and at the age of ten
was
already proficient in the Qur'an and the Arabic classics. During the
next
six years he devoted himself to Muslim Jurisprudence,
Philosophy and Natural
Science and studied Logic, Euclid, and the
Almeagest.

He turned
his attention to Medicine at the age of 17 years
and found it, in his own words,
"not difficult". However he
was greatly troubled by metaphysical
problems and in particular the
works of Aristotle. By chance, he obtained a
manual on this subject
by the celebrated philosopher al-Farabi which solved his
difficulties.

By the age
of 18 he had
built up a reputation as a physician and was summoned to attend the
Samani
ruler Nuh ibn Mansur (reigned 976-997 C.E.), who, in gratitude for Ibn

Sina's services, allowed him to make free use of the royal library,
which
contained many rare and even unique books. Endowed with great
powers of
absorbing and retaining knowledge, this Muslim scholar
devoured the contents of
the library and at the age of 21 was in a
position to compose his first book.

At about the same time
he lost his father and soon afterwards
left Bukhara and wandered
westwards. He entered the services of Ali ibn Ma'mun,
the ruler of
Khiva, for a while, but ultimately fled to avoid being kidnapped by
the
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna. After many wanderings he came to Jurjan, near
the
Caspian Sea, attracted by the fame of its ruler, Qabus, as a
patron of learning.
Unfortunately Ibn Sina's arrival almost
coincided with the deposition and murder
of this ruler. At Jurjan,
Ibn Sina lectured on logic and astronomy and wrote the
first part of
the Qanun, his greatest work.




[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]

He then moved to Ray, near modern Teheran and
established a
busy medical practice. When Ray was besieged, Ibn Sina
fled to Hamadan where he
cured Amir Shamsud-Dawala of colic and was
made Prime Minister. A mutiny of
soldiers against him caused his
dismissal and imprisonment, but subsequently the
Amir, being again
attacked by the colic, summoned him back, apologised and
reinstated
him! His life at this time was very strenuous: during the day he was
busy
with the Amir's services, while a great deal of the night was passed in

lecturing and dictating notes for his books. Students would gather
in his home
and read parts of his two great books, the Shifa and the
Qanun, already
composed.

Following
the death of the Amir, Ibn Sina fled to
Isfahan after a few brushes with the
law, including a period in
prison. He spent his final years in the services of
the ruler of the
city, Ala al-Daula whom he advised on scientific and literary
matters
and accompanied on military campaigns.

Friends
advised him to slow down
and take life in moderation, but this was not in
character. "I
prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length",
he
would reply. Worn out by hard work and hard living, Ibn Sina died in
1036/1
at a comparatively early age of 58 years. He was buried in
Hamadan where his
grave is still shown.

Al-Qifti
states that Ibn
Sina completed 21 major and 24 minor works on philosophy,
medicine,
theology, geometry, astronomy and the like. Another source
(Brockelmann)
attributes 99 books to Ibn Sina comprising 16 on medicine, 68 on
theology
and metaphysics 11 on astronomy and four on verse. Most of these were
in
Arabic; but in his native Persian he wrote a large manual on
philosophical
science entitled Danish-naama-i-Alai and a small
treatise on the pulse.

His most
celebrated Arabic poem describes the descent
of Soul into the Body from the
Higher Sphere. Among his scientific
works, the leading two are the Kitab
al-Shifa
(Book of Healing), a
philosophical encyclopaedia based
upon Aristotelian traditions and
the al-Qanun al-Tibb
which represents the final categorisation of
Greco-Arabian thoughts on Medicine.

Of Ibn
Sina's 16 medical works,
eight are versified treatises on such matter as the 25
signs
indicating the fatal termination of illnesses, hygienic precepts, proved

remedies, anatomical memoranda etc. Amongst his prose works, after
the great
Qanun, the treatise on cardiac drugs, of which the British
Museum possesses
several fine manuscripts, is probably the most
important, but it remains
unpublished.

The Qanun
is, of course,
by far the largest, most famous and most important of Ibn Sina's
works.
The work contains about one million words and like most Arabic books,
is
elaborately divided and subdivided. The main division is into
five books, of
which the first deals with general principles; the
second with simple drugs
arranged alphabetically; the third with
diseases of particular organs and
members of the body from the head
to the foot; the fourth with diseases which
though local in their
inception spread to other parts of the body, such as
fevers and the
fifth with compound medicines.

The Qanun
distinguishes mediastinitis from
pleurisy and recognises the contagious nature
of phthisis
(tuberculosis of the lung) and the spread of disease by water and
soil.
It gives a scientific diagnosis of ankylostomiasis and attributes the
condition
to an intestinal worm. The Qanun points out the importance of
dietetics,
the influence of climate and environment on health and the surgical
use
of oral anaesthetics. Ibn Sina advised surgeons to treat cancer in its
earliest
stages, ensuring the removal of all the diseased tissue. The Qanun's
materia
medica considers some 760 drugs, with comments on their
application
and effectiveness. He recommended the testing of a new drug on
animals
and humans prior to general use.

Ibn Sina
noted the close
relationship between emotions and the physical condition and
felt
that music had a definite physical and psychological effect on patients.
Of
the many psychological disorders that he described in the Qanun,
one is of
unusual interest: love sickness! ibn Sina is reputed to
have diagnosed this
condition in a Prince in Jurjan who lay sick and
whose malady had baffled local
doctors. Ibn Sina noted a fluttering
in the Prince's pulse when the address and
name of his beloved were
mentioned. The great doctor had a simple remedy: unite
the sufferer
with the beloved.

The Arabic
text of the Qanun was published in Rome in
1593 and was therefore one of the
earliest Arabic books to see
print. It was translated into Latin by Gerard of
Cremona in the 12th
century. This 'Canon', with its encyclopaedic content, its
systematic
arrangement and philosophical plan, soon worked its way into a
position
of pre-eminence in the medical literature of the age displacing the
works
of Galen, al-Razi and al-Majusi, and becoming the text book for medical

education in the schools of Europe. In the last 30 years of the
15th century it
passed through 15 Latin editions and one Hebrew. In
recent years, a partial
translation into English was made. From the
12th-17th century, the Qanun served
as the chief guide to Medical
Science in the West and is said to have influenced
Leonardo da
Vinci. In the words of Dr. William Osler, the Qanun has remained
"a
medical bible for a longer time than any other work".

Despite
such glorious tributes to his work, Ibn Sina
is rarely remembered
in the West today and his fundamental contributions to
Medicine and
the European reawakening goes largely unrecognised. However, in the
museum
at Bukhara, there are displays showing many of his writings, surgical
instruments
from the period and paintings of patients undergoing treatment. An
impressive
monument to the life and works of the man who became known as the
'doctor
of doctors' still stands outside Bukhara museum and his portrait hangs
in
the Hall of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris.




[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]


Selected
References:



1.
Edward G. Browne (1921) Arabian
Medicine, London, Cambridge
University Press.

2. Ynez Viole
O'Neill (1973) in
Mcgraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of World Biography vol
I: Aalto to Bizet.

3. Philip K.
Hitti (1970) History of the
Arabs, 10th ed, London, Macmillan, pp
367-368

4. M.A. Martin (1983) in The
Genius of
Arab Civilisation, 2nd ed, Edited by J.R. Hayes, London,
Eurabia Puplishing, pp
196-7