Avicenna

Ibn Sina, commonly known in the West as Avicenna, lived from around 980 to 22 June 1037 and was a preeminent philosopher and physician of the Muslim world, a seminal figure of the Islamic Golden Age who served in the courts of various Iranian rulers and was influential to medieval European medical and Scholastic thought. Avicenna is considered one of the greatest thinkers and medical scholars in history, often described as the father of early modern medicine; his most famous works are The Book of Healing, a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine, a medical encyclopedia that became a standard text at many medieval European universities and remained in use as late as 1650. Besides philosophy and medicine his corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics and poetry, written mostly in Arabic though he also wrote key works and poetry in Persian; his philosophy was of the Peripatetic school derived from Aristotelianism, of which he is considered among the greatest proponents within the Muslim world. Of the roughly 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 survive, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine, and he is known for a methodological approach combining empirical observation, philosophical reasoning and logical analysis.