When Ibn Sina was ten years old in the village of Afshana near Bukhara, he had already memorized the whole Quran and read most of the classical Arabic literature available in his father's house. By fourteen, he had exhausted his teachers. By sixteen, he was teaching them. He read the Metaphysics of Aristotle forty times, in his own account preserved by his student al-Juzjani, before it made sense to him. Then he read al-Farabi's commentary on it, and suddenly Aristotle became clear.
At eighteen he was in the Samanid capital of Bukhara. The Sultan Nuh ibn Mansur fell ill with a disease his personal physicians could not diagnose. Someone at court had heard of a young man in the city who was said to be a prodigy. Ibn Sina was called in. He examined the Sultan. He prescribed a treatment. The Sultan recovered.
The Sultan asked Ibn Sina what reward he wished. Ibn Sina said: I do not need gold. I would like permission to enter your library.
The library at Bukhara was one of the great libraries of the age. It was a vast, multi-storied building, arranged by subject: one room for Arabic grammar, one for poetry, one for Quranic sciences, one for jurisprudence, one for logic, one for medicine, one for astronomy, one for mathematics. The Samanid rulers had spent generations building it. The librarians could not always find what visitors asked for, because books had been forgotten in there. Ibn Sina was granted the run of it.
He described the experience later in his own words to al-Juzjani. He said: I saw books whose very names I had never heard, books I had not encountered elsewhere in my life. I read them. I benefited from them. I noted down whatever seemed useful. And then, after some time, a fire broke out in the library, and it burned. When my enemies later accused me of having burned it myself, so that I could keep the knowledge to myself, I said: they may accuse me if they wish, but the truth is that Allah bore witness for me, that I never burned anyone's book.
Whether or not the library really burned, Ibn Sina emerged from it as an encyclopedia in himself. He would write more than four hundred and fifty books over the following forty years. Two of them changed the world. Kitab al-Shifa was a philosophical encyclopedia covering the whole knowledge of the age from logic through metaphysics. Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb was a medical encyclopedia synthesizing Greek, Roman, Indian, and Islamic medicine.
Al-Qanun, the Canon of Medicine, became the standard medical textbook of the Islamic world within a century of his death. Two centuries after his death, it was translated into Latin at the school of Toledo. It became the standard medical textbook of Latin Europe. It was used at Bologna and Montpellier for six hundred years after Ibn Sina died. The medical schools of Europe were built on the Canon.
He described the correct anatomy of the eye. He described the mechanism of how tuberculosis is transmitted through droplets. He described the difference between spasmodic and non-spasmodic diseases. He described the effect of climate on health. He described how to treat a fractured skull. He gave the pharmacology of eight hundred simple drugs and hundreds of compound drugs. He worked on plagues. He worked on kidney stones. He worked on the psychology of grief. He wrote a chapter on love as a diagnostic category.
He never stayed in one court for long. He served under the Samanids in Bukhara, the Khwarazmians in Gurganj, the Buyids in Ray, and finally the Kakuyids in Hamadan. He was imprisoned twice by suspicious rulers. He escaped once by dressing as a Sufi. He continued to write in prison. When he died in Hamadan in 1037 at the age of fifty-seven, his last words, according to al-Juzjani, were: we die, and we take with us only this, that we knew.
What the story teaches. A prodigy alone in a library is not the story. The story is what a prodigy does with a library when he is done reading it. Ibn Sina did not keep the tradition to himself. He synthesized it and gave it back in a form the whole civilized world, Muslim and Christian, could use. When the medieval European medical schools began to translate the Arabic sciences into Latin, the largest single set of books they translated was Ibn Sina's. The Canon was not just his book. It was Bukhara's library flowing back out into the world through the pen of the boy who had walked into it at eighteen.