Canon of Medicine

1025

Avicenna (980–1037)

Ab ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allh ibn Sn, known in the West as Avicenna, was perhaps the most important philosopher of the Islamic tradition as well as an accomplished physician. He was a prolific author whose writings on a range of critical topics in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and psychology became a major influence in Western philosophy through his influence on Thomas Aquinas. Avicenna’s massive medical work, the Canon of Medicine, completed in 1025, was the standard medical reference work in Europe and in the Arab world until at least the seventeenth century.

Avicenna was the son of a Persian tax collector and demonstrated a formidable memory and intellect at a very early age. By the age of sixteen he was a practicing physician. Over the course of his life, he served as a judge, a teacher, a political administrator, and as a physician and vizier in several royal courts. Given how busy he was in practical affairs, one may wonder how he managed to be so productive as a scholar. In his autobiography, Avicenna claimed that much of his writing was done on horseback during military campaigns.

In psychology, Avicenna developed the “floating man” thought experiment as a means to explore self-awareness. The experiment asks us to imagine we are floating in the air without any contact with our senses; Avicenna argues that we would still know we exist. Such self-consciousness, he concludes, indicates that the soul, or self, is separate from the body.

Book 1 of the Canon of Medicine addresses the interplay between mind and body in health. In it, Avicenna adapts the old notion of the four humors and posits four temperaments that interact with them. Mental and emotional habits influence our physical health, he argues, but the body also influences our mind and emotions. Thus exercise will have a beneficial effect on our mental and emotional health. In this, he anticipated some of the tenets of modern health psychology.

SEE ALSO Psychosomatic Medicine (1939), Psychoneuroimmunology (1975), Biopsychosocial Model of Health (1977), Mind-Body Medicine (1993)

This page from a fourteenth-century copy of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine describes several internal organs, as well as the skull and bones.