Ibn Sina (Avicenna) — the Persian who read one book forty times | PERSIA'S GREATEST MINDS Part 2

History Onion · Part 2 Ibn Sina · 2:58

About a thousand years ago in Bukhara, a Persian teenager named Ibn Sina read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times. He knew it by heart and still couldn't understand it — until a bookseller sold him a guide to it by al-Farabi for three silver coins. He understood at once, and the next day, he wrote, he gave alms to the poor in thanks to God. Called in while still in his teens to help treat the ruler of Bukhara, he asked for one thing: permission to enter the royal library. When the dynasty fell, he spent the rest of his life moving between the courts of Persian princes — Gorgan, Rey, Hamadan, Isfahan — as a doctor, a chief minister, and for months a prisoner in a fortress. The great book of those years was the Canon of Medicine: Greek medicine, everything later doctors had added, and his own cases, set out in five books. Inside it are rules for testing a medicine — one disease at a time, watch how long it takes, make sure it works every time or nearly, and test it on people, because a drug tried on a lion or a horse may prove nothing about a man. Translated into Latin in Toledo in the 1100s, it was still being taught at Montpellier and Louvain in the 1600s. Europe called him Avicenna. He wrote mostly in Arabic, the scholars' language of his world, and also wrote a book of philosophy in Persian. He died in Hamadan in 1037; Iran marks National Doctors' Day on his birthday.