Avicenna (Ibn Sina)

Avicenna, Ibn Sina, was a Persian physician and philosopher who had memorised the Qur’an at ten, mastered medicine at sixteen, and served as vizier to a succession of princes while writing at night, often in prison or on the run. The Canon of Medicine was the textbook of Europe until the seventeenth century; The Cure, his philosophical encyclopaedia, reworked Aristotle into a system in which God is the only necessary being and all else is possible, and its distinction of essence from existence became the foundation of Aquinas’s metaphysics. He died at fifty-seven, some say of overwork and wine.