Avicenna begins the Canon of Medicine

1020

The Persian polymath, already author of a vast philosophical summa, began compiling a million-word encyclopedia of ancient and Islamic medicine at Hamadan. Organized around causes, symptoms, and treatments, the Canon would serve as a standard textbook in European universities until the seventeenth century. Its systematic classification of over seven hundred drugs and their properties made it the most influential medical reference work ever written in the medieval world.