Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine

A drug should be tried on a single disease, not on a patient with two conditions at once, and it should be tried on people, because a medicine that acts as hot in a human body may act as cold in a lion or a horse. These are two of the seven rules Ibn Sina gave in the second book of his Canon of Medicine for finding the strength of a remedy by experiment, which he called tajribah.

Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was born about 980 near Bukhara and had to move several times as the Persian empire broke into smaller kingdoms. He began the Canon in Jorjan, near the Caspian Sea, continued it in Rayy and finished it in Hamadan, where he died in 1037. Sources date the work from about 1012 to 1024; one account has him writing it over twelve years. He meant to add his own case notes, but the papers were lost before he could.

The five books moved from general principles, anatomy and regimen, through an alphabetical list of simple drugs, to the diseases of each part of the body, conditions such as fevers that belong to no single part, and a formulary of compound remedies. The Syrian physician Bar Hebraeus later recorded that it soon pushed aside the leading earlier textbook, the Complete Book of the Medical Art written about 983 by al-Majusi. Physicians went on writing epitomes and commentaries on it for centuries, among them Ibn al-Nafis in 13th century Syria and Hakim Ali al-Jilani at the Mughal court, who died in 1609.

In Europe it was read in the Latin translations of Gerard of Cremona and Andrea Alpago, and it was still taught at Louvain and Montpellier in the 17th century. An Arabic edition printed in Rome in 1593 was the first medical work printed in Arabic.