Avicenna (review)

This small volume provides a highly useful introduction to the life, ideas, and influence of Ibn Sina (d. 1037), known to Europeans as Avicenna. In addition to his hugely influential medical compendium, The Canon of Medicine (Kitab Qanun fi al-tibb), Avicenna composed an impressive number of major treatises (mostly in Arabic) on other topics: logic, metaphysics, psychology, music, astronomy, geometry, biology, and rhetoric. In twelve chapters, Gotthard Strohmaier takes up most of these topics.

The first chapter traces Avicenna's life, from the village near Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan where he was born around 980 (though this date has been questioned by some scholars), to Bukhara itself where he was well educated and even learned Greek, through various cities in central Asia and Iran, to Isfahan and Hamadan, where he spent his final days. In this opening chapter Strohmaier provides (in German translation) extensive quotations from Avicenna's own autobiography—a problematic source yet to be critically evaluated by scholars.

The next six chapters are devoted to Avicenna's writings on physics, metaphysics and theology, psychology, allegory and poetry, mysticism, and the physical sciences. The eighth chapter is titled "'Die Medizin gehört nicht zu den schweren Wissenschaften'"—a quotation from Avicenna's autobiography. By this statement, he meant that medicine involved merely studying texts and gaining practice and did not require the solving of syllogisms, for which reason he claims that he was able to master the subject, self-taught, by the age of seventeen. He followed Aristotle in many of his teachings, but he was a Galenist when it came to medicine, and the resulting tension is evident in his medical compositions. Strohmaier surveys a number of these treatises, focusing upon the Canon and various anatomical and embryological concepts as well as notions of psychosomatic illness. He also briefly addresses the vexed question of the extent of Avicenna's actual medical practice, supplying two examples of "clinical" histories recorded by a student, in one of which Avicenna cured himself of a headache by placing an ice pack on his head.

The remaining four chapters are concerned with the later reputation of Avicenna as a physician and as a philosopher, his reception by Jewish writers, and his role in the Western university curriculum and the world of poetry (Dante's Divine Comedy and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), concluding with an impassioned essay titled "Ein polemlisch gefärbtes Nachwort" on the creativity of medieval Islamic scholars. The volume is supplemented by a chronology of dates and rulers, an excellent map of Avicenna's travels, a sample of his signature from a manuscript now in Paris, and photographs of a thirteenth-century ceramic dish depicting bloodletting and various early-modern and modern commemorations and "portraits" (woodcuts, sculptures, even a banknote).

For German readers, this is a well-constructed and readable introduction to the life and thought of a major medieval figure. For English-language readers, the publication of an English translation would be useful—but short of that, they might consult the fine essay on Avicenna prepared by a team of scholars (including M. Mahdi and D. Gutas) recently published in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (3: 66-110).