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Secondary sourceBook1025

Canon of Medicine

Avicenna · 1025

Ibn Sina's great medical encyclopedia, included here because Ibn Sina exchanged letters and philosophical disputes with al-Biruni.

The Canon's author, Ibn Sina, was al-Biruni's correspondent and intellectual sparring partner in surviving exchanged letters.

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An open bound book on a wooden table, showing two pages of handwritten Arabic-script manuscript text in dark ink, with small diagrams of round, clustered shapes on the left page and marginal notes on the right page.
Avicenna (Ibn Sina), Canon of Medicine, completed 1025. Manuscript copy, Museum and Mausoleum of Avicenna, Hamedan, Iran.

About this source

What it is

The Canon of Medicine is a five-book encyclopedia of medicine compiled by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and completed in 1025. It drew on Greco-Roman, Persian, Chinese and Indian medical traditions and became a standard medical textbook in both the Islamic world and Europe for centuries.

Why it matters

Ibn Sina was a contemporary and correspondent of al-Biruni; the two exchanged letters debating questions of natural philosophy. The Canon shows the intellectual world al-Biruni worked in, where scholars combined inherited Greek knowledge with new observation and argument.

Look closer

  • What does it tell us that a medical book from the 11th century was still used in European universities centuries later?
  • How might Ibn Sina and al-Biruni's exchanged letters have shaped each other's ideas?
  • The manuscript shown is a later copy — what might change between the original and copies made afterward?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Al-Biruni and Avicenna on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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