Explore
Compare
Life
He treated gladiators, then emperors, and built a system of medicine from animal dissection so authoritative that doctors were still quoting it as fact fourteen centuries later.
A child prodigy who mastered medicine at sixteen and philosophy by eighteen. He wandered Persia, writing the books that shaped medieval thought.
Connection
Galen Galenic medicine synthesized into the Canon Ibn Sina — Ibn Sina absorbed and systematized Galen's medical corpus into his own Canon of Medicine, the standard medical textbook across the Islamic world and, in Latin translation, European universities for over five hundred years.
Ideas
Words
“Employment is nature's physician, and is essential to human happiness.”
“The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.”
“The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired until one knows the causes.”
“The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion, and men who have religion and no wit.”
Key Moments
c. 157 CE
Appointed physician to the gladiators
c. 168 CE
Becomes physician to Marcus Aurelius
980 CE
Born near Bukhara
c. 996 CE
Mastering Medicine by Sixteen
c. 1012 CE
The Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing
1037 CE
Death in Isfahan
Works
On the Natural Faculties
The Book of Healing