Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the philosopher Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna in the west, 1038th birthday
He was a Persian polymath and one of the pre-modern world’s most influential philosophers.
Born in the year 980, he grew up in Afšana, a village near Bukhara, near present-day Uzbekistan, during the Islamic Golden Age.
The name Avicenna is the Latin corruption of Ibn Sina, which means ‘Son of Sina.’
He was a self-taught polymath and learned Indian arithmetic from an Indian grocer.
His major work, Al Qanun fi’l-Tibb, ‘The Canon of Medicine’, continues to be taught as a medical textbook in Europe and in the Islamic world until the early modern period.
It was split into five texts and according to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, and presents an “integrated view of surgery and medicine” and continues to have “an enduring respect.”
The pioneering stay was translated into Latin in the 12th century and became the predominant text used in European medical courses until the 17th century.
It was the first work to identify contagious diseases such as tuberculosis, to hypothesise that soil and water spread sickness and to set forth the basics of anatomy, paediatrics and gynecology.
The Canon is now credited as forming the basic of Western medicine.