say that the “Canon” was a medical bible for a longer period than any other work.  It “stands for the epitome of all precedent development, the final codification of all Graeco-Arabic medicine.  It is a hierarchy of laws liberally illustrated by facts which so ingeniously rule and are subject to one another, stay and uphold one another, that admiration is compelled for the sagacity of the great organiser who, with unparalleled power of systematisation, collecting his material from all sources, constructed so imposing an edifice of fallacy.  Avicenna, according to his lights, imparted to contemporary medical science the appearance of almost mathematical accuracy, whilst the art of therapeutics, although empiricism did not wholly lack recognition, was deduced as a logical sequence from theoretical (Galenic and Aristotelian) premises.  Is it, therefore, matter for surprise that the majority of investigators and practitioners should have fallen under the spell of this consummation of formalism and should have regarded the ‘Canon’ as an infallible oracle, the more so in that the logical construction was impeccable and the premises, in the light of contemporary conceptions, passed for incontrovertible axioms?"(13)

     (12) Withington:  Medical History, London, 1894, pp. 151-152.

     (13) Neuburger:  History of Medicine, Vol.  I, pp. 368-369.

Innumerable manuscripts of it exist:  of one of the most beautiful, a Hebrew version (Bologna Library), I give an illustration.  A Latin version was printed in 1472 and there are many later editions, the last in 1663.  Avicenna was not only a successful writer, but the prototype of the successful physician who was at the same time statesman, teacher, philosopher and literary man.  Rumor has it that he became dissipated, and a contemporary saying was that all his philosophy could not make him moral, nor all his physic teach him to preserve his health.  He enjoyed a great reputation as a poet.  I reproduce a page of a manuscript of one of his poems, which we have in the Bodleian Library.  Prof.  A.V.W.  Jackson says that some of his verse is peculiarly Khayyamesque, though he antedated Omar by a century.  That “large Infidel” might well have written such a stanza as

     From Earth’s dark centre unto Saturn’s Gate
     I’ve solved all problems of this world’s Estate,
     From every snare of Plot and Guile set free,
     Each bond resolved, saving alone Death’s Fate.

His hymn to the Deity might have been written by Plato and rivals the famous one of Cleanthes.(14) A casual reader gets a very favorable impression of Avicenna.  The story of his dominion over the schools in the Middle Ages is one of the most striking in our history.  Perhaps we feel that Leclerc exaggerates when he says:  “Avicenna is an intellectual phenomenon.  Never perhaps has an example been seen of so precocious, quick and wide an intellect extending and asserting itself with so strange and indefatigable an activity.”