The most remarkable volume he showed us was a heavy folio, perhaps 15 by 20 inches in size, of the thickest kind of parchment, covered with beautiful script. It is a work of world-wide fame, but doubtless there are few such beautiful copies. It is known in the medical world as the " Avicenna," and is a treatise on botany and medicine by a famous physician and philosopher and the most learned man of his time.
The librarian insisted that it was the most important book on medicine ever written and that medical men from every part of the world came to Constantinople to consult it. "It tells," he said, "about every kind of disease that afflicts human beings, and about every plant that grows, and what diseases each plant will cure. " There is no finer specimen of penmanship in the world than this volume, and although he was certainly mistaken when he said that it was written by the hand of Dr. Avicenna himself, he did not wander very far from the truth in his assertions concerning the value and importance of the treatise. Although many of its theories have long since been exploded, and human knowledge on the subjects of which it treats has been expanded, it is undoubtedly the most famous and remarkable medical work that was ever written, and is well known to every educated physician.
The author, whose name was Abu Ali el Hosein, was born in Bokhara, about the year 980 A.D., of a Persian father and a Bokhara mother. He was educated among the great scholars who at that period made Bokhara famous as a centre of learning. At a very early age he had mastered mathematics, logic, theology, and medicine. Before he was sixteen he was famihar with all the medical theories of that time, and by gratuitous attendance upon the sick had discovered new methods of treatment. He developed remarkable genius in botanizing and in extracting the medicinal properties from plants, in which he was assisted, according to the popular idea, by supernatural agencies. When he was seventeen years old he was famous throughout the khanate of Bokhara, and was appointed official physician to the emir, who owed him his recovery from a dangerous illness. This appointment gave Avicenna, as he was known, leisure to study, means to purchase books that he required, and access to a library which was filled with important manuscripts on scientific and other subjects.
When he was twenty-two years old, Avicenna left Bokhara and proceeded westward to Merv, Kliiva, and other centres of learning, where he remained for a few years, and then went over into Persia, where he settled at Rai, the birthplace of Zoroaster, in the vicinity of modern Teheran. There Avicenna remained the greater part of his life, prosecuting his studies, teaching medicine, and writing books. He received generous support from the emir, although at times he was subject to persecution and various annoyances. The last twelve years of his life were spent as physician and scientific adviser to the emir of Ispaha.
It appears that Avicenna, like many other wise and great men, did not practise what he preached, but at intervals indulged in excessive sensual pleasures and dissipation, which ruined his health, and he died in June, 1037, at the age of fifty-eight, at the city of Hamaden, Persia, and was buried among the palm trees in the park that surrounds the palace.
He wrote more than one hundred treatises. Some of them are pamphlets of a few pages; others extend through several volumes, and they covered the entire range of scientific and intellectual activity at that age of the world, from astronomy to zoology. His greatest work, entitled "The Canons of Medicine," that which was shown me by the librarian at St. Sophia, for six centuries was the highest authority upon medical subjects throughout the civilized world. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century it was used as a text book in most of the European universities, and even now lecturers in the most famous medical schools frequently refer to the discoveries and theories of Avicenna with profound respect.
In the Middle Ages manuscript copies of this book were sought for the libraries of kings as well as scientists, and no library was complete without his works on metaphysics, mathematics, alchemy, logic, botany, and philosophy. Avicenna ranks among Moslem scholars as Aristotle or Plato ranks among the Greeks. For six hundred years he was entitled to his surname of "Prince of Physicians." In the mediaeval world he ranked equally high as a philosopher and astronomer. His writings have been discussed and elucidated by himdreds of commentators in every one of the civilized nations.