Medicine · a Light

One textbook was taught in Europe for six centuries

Ibn Sina finished the Canon of Medicine around 1025. It is five books: general principles, some eight hundred simple drugs, diseases taken organ by organ from head to foot, diseases affecting the whole body, and a formulary of compound remedies. Its success was organisation. What Greek, Persian, Indian and Arabic medicine held was arranged so that a physician could find the passage he needed, which made it teachable. Gerard of Cremona translated it at Toledo in the twelfth century, it was printed in Latin in the 1470s, and it was still set reading in Italian and French medical faculties in the sixteenth century. That was also the trouble with it. A book good enough to be the syllabus is a book people stop testing, and physicians from Ibn al-Nafis onward had to argue against it.

Ibn Sina · Canon of Medicine, c. 1025