Avicenna on Theology (1951)

One may at some point wonder what students were using for a textbook on medicine 1000 years ago. Did it have any similarity to what we know as a textbook today? If we were to take Avicenna s Poem on Medicine as an example, we see that it was far from what we know a textbook to be today. Here, in the Urjuza fi l tibb, it comes in the form of an easily memorized rhymed verse. Physicians were offered a mnemonic in the form of a poem which established the essentials of Avicenna's theory and principles, observations, advice on therapeutics and dietetics, simple surgical techniques. This is the famous Urjuza fi l-tibb, which was translated into Latin several times from the 13th to the 17th century, under the title Cantica Avicennae (ed. with French trans. by H. Jahier and A. Noureddine, Paris 1956, Poeme de la Medecine, together with Armengaud de Blaise's Latin translation).(Encyclopedia of 1999 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands)