Introduction:

Ibn Sina was born in 980 C.E. in the village of Afshana near Bukhara. 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 Quran and the Arabic classics.


Life and achievements of Ibn Sina:

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 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. 


Muslim scholars


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.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.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.Al-Qifti states that Ibn Sina completed 21 major and 24 minor works on philosophy, medicine, theology, geometry and astronomy. 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.

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

indicating the fatal termination of illnesses, hygienic precepts, proved remedies, anatomical Of Ibn Sina's 16 medical works, eight are versified treatises on such matter as the 25 signs which the British Museum possesses several fine manuscripts, is probably the most important, memoranda, etc. Amongst his prose works, after the great Qanun, the treatise on cardiac drugs, ofbut it remains unpublished.works. 

The work contains about one million words and like most Arabic books, is elaborately The Qanun is, of course, by far the largest, most famous and most important of Ibn Sina's 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 which though local in their inception spread to other parts of the body, such as fevers and the of particular organs and members of the body from the head to the foot; the fourth with diseasesfifth with compound medicines.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 hada simple remedy: unite the sufferer with the beloved.