more than seventeen pounds. It is an
encyclopaedia filled with extracts from the Greek and other writers,
interspersed with memoranda of his own experiences. His "Almansor" was
a very popular text-book, and one of the first to be printed. Book IX
of "Almansor" (the name of the prince to whom it was addressed) with the
title "De aegritudinibus a capite usque ad pedes," was a very favorite
mediaeval text-book. On account of his zeal for study Rhazes was known
as the "Experimentator."

The first of the Arabians, known throughout the Middle Ages as the
Prince, the rival, indeed, of Galen, was the Persian Ibn Sina, better
known as Avicenna, one of the greatest names in the history of medicine.
Born about 980 A. D. in the province of Khorasan, near Bokhara, he has
left a brief autobiography from which we learn something of his early
years. He could repeat the Koran by heart when ten years old, and at
twelve he had disputed in law and in logic. So that he found medicine
was an easy subject, not hard and thorny like mathematics and
metaphysics! He worked night and day, and could solve problems in his
dreams. "When I found a difficulty," he says, "I referred to my notes
and prayed to the Creator. At night, when weak or sleepy, I strengthened
myself with a glass of wine."(12) He was a voluminous writer to whom
scores of books are attributed, and he is the author of the most famous
medical text-book ever written. It is safe to say that the "Canon" was
a medical bible for a longer period than any other work. It "stands for
the epitome of all precedent development, the final codification of all
Graeco-Arabic medicine. It is a hierarchy of laws liberally illustrated
by facts which so ingeniously rule and are subject to one another, stay
and uphold one another, that admiration is compelled for the sagacity
of the great organiser who, with unparalleled power of systematisation,
collecting his material from all sources, constructed so imposing an
edifice of fallacy. Avicenna, according to his lights, imparted to
contemporary medical science the appearance of almost mathematical
accuracy, whilst the art of therapeutics, although empiricism did
not wholly lack recognition, was deduced as a logical sequence from
theoretical (Galenic and Aristotelian) premises. Is it, therefore,
matter for surprise that the majority of investigators and practitioners
should have fallen under the spell of this consummation of formalism and
should have regar