Ibn Sina
A medical textbook used in Europe for six hundred years
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The *Canon* is as much an organisational as a medical achievement: it made an unwieldy tradition searchable. He also proposed principles for testing remedies that resemble clinical trials. As a philosopher he reconciled Aristotle with Islamic theology, and his "floating man" — a thought experiment on self-awareness without the senses — anticipates Descartes by six centuries.
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Ibn Sina gathered all known medicine into one work, ordered it systematically and added observations of his own — among them that some diseases spread through water and soil. The book was a set text at European universities into the seventeenth century.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org