Avicenna was one of the first medieval scholarly medical doctors. “Avicenna” is how his name came into Latin, the way al-Khwarismi came to us as algorithm. It’s a shortening of Ibn Sina, son of Sina, which was actually his family’s more-or-less surname since Sina had lived many generations previously. Wikipedia tells me his full name was Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdillāh ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī ibn Sīnā. His personal name was Husayn, and the names after that are a listing of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather—-while the “Abu Ali” part means his son was probably named Ali. “Ibn Sina” is how his works were signed.
Born around 980, Avicenna grew up near Bukhara, the capital of the Saminid Iranian dynasty. In theory, the Caliph in Baghdad ruled over all, but in practice, independent Sultans ruled small Persian and Turkish kingdoms from Afghanistan to Syria. Bukhara was a great imperial capital with income from the Silk Road trade. The Sultan funded scholarship, which was a nucleus of early university activity.
Young Husayn Avicenna began normal Islamic education with the Quran, but he was a prodigy who quickly moved on to mathematics, medicine and philosophy. By age 18, he was counted as a medical doctor in his own right, and he had extensively read the works of Aristotle and Islamic law. For four years, around the year 1000, he was chief doctor to the Sultan of Bukhara, until his father had died and the dynasty was overthrown. Then he moved westward through Iran by stages, serving as the Sultan’s doctor wherever he was.
He appears to have written as many as 450 books on topics of theology, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy and astrology, alchemy (early chemistry) and of course medicine. His five-volume medical encyclopedia became the primary book of its time, translated and copied widely. It was originally written in Arabic, although the Sultans in Iran at that time were encouraging scholars to return to writing in Persian, as they had done in pre-Islamic times. It was translated into Latin, probably in Cordoba during its Golden Age, but it was also translated into Irish, as we know from a fragment found last year.
Avicenna’s medicine isn’t going to impress us; he taught the four humors of the body as did everyone at the time. He had some interesting ideas in other fields, for example, he thought that light had a speed, as we now know it does. He posited that heat was generated from motion. All in all, he was one of history’s most impressive men for the sheer volume of ideas he gathered and generated in his 58 years.