Ibn Sina

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdullah ibn Sina was born in the village of Afshana near Bukhara in 980 CE. His father was a Fatimid official; his teachers, Muslim philosophers and physicians. By the age of ten he had memorized the Quran. By sixteen he was a practicing physician. By eighteen he cured the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur of an illness others had failed to treat, and was granted the run of the royal library, one of the greatest libraries in the world.

He composed more than 450 works. Two of them changed the world. Kitab al-Shifa (the Book of Healing) was a philosophical encyclopedia covering logic, natural sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics. Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb (the Canon of Medicine) synthesized Greek, Roman, Indian, and Islamic medical knowledge into a single system.

The Canon became the standard medical textbook in the Islamic world and in Latin Europe. Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, it was used in the medical schools of Bologna and Montpellier until the seventeenth century. Ibn Sina described contagious diseases, the correct anatomy of the eye, the transmission of tuberculosis through droplets, the healing of fractures, and pharmacological principles that were only refined nine hundred years later.

He led a mobile life, moving between the courts of Bukhara, Gurganj, Ray, and Hamadan, at times imprisoned by suspicious rulers, at times a vizier. He died in Hamadan in 1037 and is buried there. His tomb is one of the most-visited scholarly graves in the Islamic world.