Islamic Golden Age polymath Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina (980-1037), better known as ibn Sina and Avicenna, influenced healthcare for centuries by laying foundational principles for modern medicine, emphasizing disease prevention and understanding transmission vectors
In the 19th century, Hungarian physician and scientist Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (1818-1865) noticed something counterintuitive that prompted him to probe further and help develop a life-saving procedure in Europe. Semmelweis observed a higher mortality rate among women who saw experienced and expensive doctors for birth compared to those who could not afford expensive healthcare.
Semmelweis sought to figure out the phenomenon by following the trainee doctors whom the poor women often went to. Unlike senior doctors, he noticed that the trainees washed their hands as they worked on cadavers. Semmelweis concluded that washing hands was the key and would come to be known as the ‘saviour of mothers’ by introducing hygiene procedures.
Semmelweis saved lives, but he was not the first to introduce a disinfection protocol in a hospital. The soap had been around for millennia and was part of such protocols before it became a mass-produced product in Europe only in the 19th century. Ancient Babylon and India had antiseptic procedures for treating patients centuries before Europeans.
The Pioneer
It was Islamic Golden Age polymath Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abd Allah ibn Sina (980-1037), better known as ibn Sina and Avicenna, who exactly spelled out the idea in his 11th-century magnum opus, Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb or the Canon of Medicine, by focusing on interrupting the transmission vectors. The Canon, which completes 1,000 years in 2025, is an integrated guide of surgery and medicine that has influenced scholarly concepts and principles for centuries.
The University of California at San Francisco biopharmaceutical sciences professor John Urquhart highlighted the pioneering nature of Ibn Sina’s work, underlining that the polymath correctly saw medicine and surgery as one. He said he would have preferred the Canon over Principles and Practice of Medicine, published over eight centuries later in 1892, establishing Canadian physician William Osler as the leading authority in medical teaching, if the year were 1900 and he were marooned and needed a guide for practical medicine.
Urquhart explained his preference in the second Al Hammadi lecture at the St Andrew’s Day therapeutics symposium at Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians titled ‘How Islam changed medicine‘. He said the Canon presented an integrated view of surgery and medicine. Ibn Sina, for instance, showed how to judge the margin of healthy tissue to remove with an amputation. Osler shunned intervention in his book. Urquhart underlined that the gap between medicine and surgery was closing, with interventional cardiology, gastroenterology, radiology, etc, and Ibn Sina correctly saw medicine and surgery as one.
The Canon of Medicine, Ibn Sina’s best-known work, was translated into Latin in the 12th century. It was part of the medical curriculum in Europe until the 17th century. The Canon’s reputation led to the translation into Latin of Ibn Sina’s Latin-al-Adwiya al-qalbīya (cardiac medication) and al-Urjūza fī al-ṭibb, a versified medical manual.
Ibn Sina, who is referred to as princeps medicorum (prince of physicians) in the West, organized the Canon of Medicine into five books—al-Umūr al-kulliya fī ‘ilm al-ṭibb (general medical principles), al-Adwiya al-mufrada (materia medica), al-Amrāḍ al-juz’iya (special pathology), al-Amrāḍ allatī lā takhtaṣṣ bi ‘udw bi ‘aynihi (diseases involving more than one member) and al-Adwiya al-murakkaba wa al-aqrābādhīn (formulary).
Al-Adwiya al-mufrada lists around 800 drugs of vegetable and mineral origin. Al-Amrāḍ al-juz’iya discusses the diseases of individual organs. Al-Amrāḍ allatī lā takhtaṣṣ bi ‘udw bi ‘aynihi is about conditions affecting the entire body. Al-Adwiya al-murakkaba wa al-aqrābādhīn is focused on medicinal compounds, their uses, and effects.
Million-word Masterpiece
The million-word Canon summed up Arabian medicine, its Greek roots, and Ibn Sina’s observations. It documented the eye anatomy and described conditions such as cataracts. He said tuberculosis was contagious and explained the symptoms of diabetes. Ibn Sina described types of facial paralysis, psychiatric disorders, and the spine’s functional neuroanatomy. The Canon included the vertebral structure, parts of its column, and their biomechanics. It contributed to perinatal medicine, including the causes of deformity.
Ali ibn al-Abbas al-Majusi’s Kitab Kamil al-sinaàh al-tibbiyyah (the Complete Book of the Medical Art, composed about 983) was the most celebrated medical book before Ibn Sina’s Canon. Ibn al-Ibri, known as Bar Hebraeus in the West, included more practical clinical advice in the Kitab Kamil al-sinaàh al-tibbiyyah, but the Canon eclipsed it.
Austin Community College historian Roy Casagranda explained how Ibn Sina revolutionised medical sciences in a lecture on the 1,000-year Legacy of the polymath at Dubai’s Museum of the Future. Casagranda said Ibn Sina, who believed logic was the end-all be-all, noticed that quackery was being passed off as medicine. There was no concept of different diseases, how one got them, and how they affected in different ways. Ibn Sina found this ludicrous. He said diseases are plural. They have different transmission vectors.
Foundational Principles
Ibn Sina said cures are great, but preventive intervention is better. He argued for interrupting the transmission vectors and preventing sickness. Ibn Sina called prevention better than cure, providing the foundation for modern medicine. He made prevention the goal. Casagranda argued that Hippocrates may be the father of medicine, but Ibn Sina is the father of modern medicine.
Casagranda noted that Ibn Sina also realized that time and information are correlated. As time goes forward, information is generated, and there is no way to undo this. Casagranda said that 1,000 years ago, Ibn Sina described entropy, saying there would be less and less information if he took the whole universe and ran backwards in time.
Ibn Sina said what would happen is that at some point in an unimaginably far past, he would be reduced to a tiny packet of information, but just enough that the entire universe could unfold from it. Casagranda argued Ibn Sina described a singularity—the Big Bang—1,000 years ago. He underlined that Ibn Sina did not say it was an explosion or talk about atoms and helium, or being generated from hydrogen. But that is effectively what it is.
Foremost Savant
The Canon marked the zenith of Ibn Sina’s career as a prolific author of works about metaphysics, theology, medicine, psychology, earth sciences, physics, astronomy, astrology, and chemistry. The phenomenal body of work earned him the title al-Shaykh al-Raʼīs (the preeminent scholar) and the status as one of the Islamic world’s foremost savants.
Ibn Sina showed promise as a child in Bukhara (modern-day Uzbekistan), a center of learning, philosophers, and thinkers, under the Samanid Empire. His brilliance was recognised early in his life. Ibn Sina showed there was something special about him when he memorized the Quran when he was 10. His father nurtured him and hired a teacher to teach him math. Ibn Sina absorbed and loved maths. He mastered Islamic jurisprudence at age 13 before learning philosophy. Ibn Sina read Porphyrios’s Isagoge, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Euclid’s geometry, and Aristotle. By the time he was 16, Ibn Sina’s teacher told him he had eclipsed him and had nothing more to teach him.
Goethe’s Mind, Leonardo da Vinci’s Genius
Ibn Sina would become among the leading thinkers of the Islamic Renaissance. He has been described as having Goethe’s mind and Leonardo da Vinci’s genius. Born in 980 AD in Afshanah, a village near Bukhara, he was proficient in Arabic and its literary classics. Ibn Sina studied Islamic law, jurisprudence, philosophy, logic, and natural sciences.
At 13, Ibn Sina started studying medicine and was an established physician five years later. Ibn Sina’s treatment of a seriously ill Samanid dynasty Sultan Nuh Ibn Mansour was a turning point for him. The sultan rewarded him with access to the royal library, a treasure trove where Ibn Sina read rare manuscripts and unique books.
The Samanid dynasty’s defeat at the hands of Mahmud Ghaznawi forced Ibn Sina to move to Gurganj (present-day Turkmenistan), where he lectured on astronomy and logic and wrote the Canon’s first part. Ibn Sina later moved to Rayy near the modern-day Iranian capital of Tehran and practiced medicine. He wrote around 30 books in Rayy. In Hamadan (Iran), he cured the ruler Emir Shams al-Dawlah from a severe colic and became his private physician and Prime Minister. Ibn Sina spent his final years and died in Hamadan in 1037 AD at 57.
Only 240 of Ibn Sina’s 450 works are believed to have survived. Kitab al Shifa (the Book of Healing) was most significant of his books on philosophy, bringing Aristotelian and Platonian traditions together with Islamic theology. It divided knowledge into theoretical physics, metaphysics, and mathematics, and practical knowledge into ethics, economics, and politics.
Ibn Sina read and absorbed all the books that came his way until Aristotle’s metaphysics, which was written idiomatically, stumped him. He could not figure it out and read it 40 times. Ninth-century philosopher al-Farabi (Latinized as Alpharabius)’s book helped Ibn Sina understand Aristotle. Farabi went through the metaphysics to figure out what all the idioms meant.
The Milieu
Thinkers such as al-Farabi were key to an enabling atmosphere of openness that made pioneering works of people such as Ibn Sina possible. Al Farabi argued there was no way a merciful God would have abandoned non-Christians, non-Jews, non-Muslims, and the non-Zoroastrians, and that there must be a path for them too, meaning multiple ways of gaining wisdom. Casagranda has argued that al-Farabi’s views were influential and built on the tolerance baked into the system.
Casagranda underlined that most people in the Muslim world at the time, unlike in Europe, believed that if you were a Zoroastrian, Jewish, or Christian, you had a pathway to salvation and did not necessarily have to be a Muslim for that. This openness and acceptance helped usher in the high point of the Islamic Golden Age from the eighth to the 11th centuries, which has been described as an era ‘as brilliant a period of cultural history’ as Italy’s High Renaissance.
