Statue Unveiled to Mark Great Persian Physician Birth Anniversary

In a ceremony attended by some Iranian officials on Saturday at Tehran’s Milad tower, the statue of Great Persian Physician Avicenna was unveiled.

The birth anniversary of Abu Ali Sina, known in the west as Avicenna, is commemorated as National Doctors’ Day by Iranians each year on August 23.

Avicenna was a Persian and Muslim physician, astronomer, alchemist, chemist, logician, mathematician, metaphysician, philosopher, physicist, poet, scientist, theologian, and statesman. Avicenna was born around 980 AD in Afshana near Bukhara then a part of Iran and now part of Uzbekistan and died in 1037 AD in the city of Hamadan.

He is regarded as the father of the modern medicine for introducing systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology and contributing to the discovery of contagious diseases. He is also considered as the father of the fundamental concept of momentum in physics.

Avicenna wrote some 450 books on a wide range of subjects, many of which concentrated on philosophy and medicine. His most famous works are the ‘Book of Healing’ and the ‘Canon of Medicine’, which was a standard medical text at many Islamic and European universities until the 18th century. He wrote most of his works in Arabic, since it was the dominant language for centuries following the Arab invasion of Iran.

However, he also wrote a large manual on philosophical science entitled ‘Danesh-Naame Alai’ and a small paper on the pulse in his native language, Persian.

Among Avicenna’s 16 medical works, eight are versified treatises on issues such as the 25 signs indicating the fatal termination of illnesses, hygienic precepts, proved remedies, anatomical memoranda etc. Amongst his prose works, after the great Canon, the treatise on cardiac drugs, a large number of fine manuscripts which have remained unpublished, are being kept at the British Museum.

The Canon is the most famous and most important of Ibn Sina’s works. The work contains about one million words and like most Arabic books, is elaborately divided and subdivided into five books, of which the first deals with general principles, the second with simple drugs arranged alphabetically, the third with diseases of particular organs and members of the body from the head to the foot, the fourth with diseases which though local in their inception spread to other parts of the body such as fevers and the fifth with compound medicines.

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