Avicenna completes the Canon of Medicine

The Persian polymath Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, finished the Canon of Medicine, a five-volume encyclopaedia, around 1025. It systematised Greek, Roman, Persian and Indian medicine, describing the contagious nature of diseases like tuberculosis, quarantine, drug testing, and listing about 800 drugs. Translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century, it was a standard textbook in European universities until the seventeenth century and in parts of the Islamic world even later. Avicenna also wrote a major work on philosophy, the Book of Healing.

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