January 22, 2014 • 26 mins
You may never have heard of him, but Avicenna was one of the first, and probably the most influential, Islamic philosopher-scientists. He's listed among the great philosophers in Dante's Inferno and is mentioned in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Vie Wilson and I and you may
have never heard of today's subject, but Avicenna was one
(00:21):
of the first and probably the most influential Islamic philosopher scientists.
He's listed among the great philosophers in Dante's Inferno, and
in the prologue to the Canary Tales. The doctor of
physic who was in the party has studied his work.
There's also a portrait of him hanging in the hall
of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris.
(00:44):
He had this expansive, brilliant knowledge, and he was so
methodical and systematic, and the way that he wrote down
in cataloged information that his work in medicine became sought
after basically all over the place. He influenced the field
of medicine throughout the Islamic and Christian medieval worlds, and
his influence in Europe in the field of medicine lasted
(01:07):
well into the seventeenth century, to the point that schools
based their entire medical curricula on his writings. He was
also one of the most important philosophers in history. His work,
which was written mostly in Arabic, was rooted in Islam,
along with Aristotelian and neo Platonist philosophy in the Muslim world.
(01:28):
This philosophy continues to be studied today, and the fact
that Avicenna was influential to both Christians and Muslims makes
him really unique among ancient philosophers and scholars of his time. Today,
his work exists in more than two hundred commentaries, annotations
of bridgements, and translations. So, as we usually do, will
(01:50):
start at the beginning UH and then Farsi. His name
is actually Ibn Sina. In Arabic, it's Abu al al Hussain.
Ibn Sina. Avicenna is actually the medieval latinization of his name.
We're calling him that instead of calling him even Sina
because the overwhelming preponderance of information about him, regardless of
(02:13):
what culture it's written from, UH calls him that. He
became known by that name a very very long time ago.
He was born around nine eighty in a village near Bukara, Iran,
which is now in Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Bukara is
in south central Uzbekistan at a river delta, and it
lay along the Silk Road. Today its center is a
(02:35):
UNESCO World Heritage Site, and at the time it was
the capital, and it was an intellectually rich place to
grow up. This was also the fourth century of the
Islamic calendar, and this part of the world was really
flourishing in knowledge and intellect at this point. His father
was a governor and a scholar as well, and Avicenna
was a very bright and gifted child, and he claimed
(02:58):
to have memorized the higher Koran by the time he
was ten years old. His father's position and the number
of libraries and scholars where they lived meant that his
precociousness was really encouraged and nourished, and much of his
early study was an Aristotilian philosophy. But he surpassed his
teachers when he was quite young, and so he furthered
(03:19):
his education on his own once they no longer had
anything they could teach him. At the age of sixteen,
he turned from studying philosophy to studying medicine, which was
a discipline that he said he found extremely easy. And
when he was still quite young, the Sultan of Bukara,
the city where he was living, got sick and the
court physicians were not able to cure him, but Avicenna
(03:41):
did cure him, but as a reward, the Sultan gave
him access to the royal library, which opened up all
kinds of avenues for his own personal study. Getting access
to books and knowledge through his practice of medicine for
wealthy patrons actually became a pattern that he repeated throughout
his life. The self taught knowledge that he got from
all this was so broad that he also claimed to
(04:03):
have mastered all of the sciences by the age of eighteen.
Brilliant slash a little egotistical yes that comes up often
and writing about him that in addition to being extremely smart,
he knew he was extremely smart and could be kind
of conceited about it. Uh So, when he was a
young man, his father died and he for a while
(04:26):
held an administrative post. It's possible that he succeeded his
father and the governorship, but the records are not entirely
clear on that point. So we knew a fair amount
about Avison's life because he dictated an autobiography to a
protege named Algis Johnny, and this protegee also added additional
biographical information. Some of Avison's own correspondents also survives, but
(04:49):
we don't really have a whole lot of contemporaneous accounts
to balance out this perspective. UM, and the existence of
the autobiography also seems to have had this unintended side
effect of prompting less scholarship about his life. It was
basically like, there's already all this information here, so we
don't need to go on a quest to find more
(05:10):
of it. And especially when it comes to his youth,
the autobiography is all we have uh, and its discussion
of his childhood is really more like the study of
a scholar set out in such a way as to
act as evidence of avice and his own thoughts on
knowledge and wisdom. It basically recounts his learning. It moves
through increasingly difficult material and sequence uh and often his
(05:32):
own without instruction, so he basically kind of does maps
out the natural progression of I learned a little bit,
I learned some harder things. Eventually I had to seek
out my own knowledge because no one could teach me right. So,
rather than sort of being a story about how he
grew up, this autobiography, when it comes to his youth
is more like an illustration of how a person can
(05:53):
acquire wisdom and knowledge through intuition, So it's almost more
like a curriculum for learning things and an example of
having done it, rather than an autobiography as we would
think of it today. And in his adulthood, he was
known to be a gregarious person who loved life and
its pleasures, including drinking and sex. He was witty and charismatic,
(06:15):
and he was often in the company of friends, and
at the same time, as is often the case with geniuses,
he could also have periods of brooding and loneliness. So
go figure, no surprise, really not really, As in many religions,
excessive sex and alcohol consumption were quite frowned upon among
strict Muslims where he lived, So there these same traits
(06:39):
that kind of defined him also put him at odds
with Islamic conventions and social norms, and they earned him
a lot of enemies as well. He had to move
from place to place and from patron to patron as
he rubbed people the wrong way with his flaunting of
religious and social expectations and of you know, being kind
of pretentious and hard to get along way and As
(07:01):
we said earlier, he was also a little conceited and arrogant.
He was brilliant and he knew it, and he was
not afraid to tell people how much he knew or
how very good he was at any particular thing. And
this is the one that always makes me go, oh
no Avicenna. Uh. He was also not shy about embarrassing
and shaming his rivals if they rubbed him the wrong way. Yeah.
(07:21):
So he was pretty outspoken about his greatness and everyone
else's not greatness. Right. He would do things like show
someone a forgery, knowing that it was a forgery, to
see if that person would spot that it was a
fart a forgery in front of others, and when the
person did not spot that it was a forgery, make
(07:42):
fun of them. It's kind of a brilliant jerk. Yeah. But,
as we are about to talk about, extensively, hugely influential
and important, especially in the worlds of philosophy and medicine.
By about the age of twenty one, Avicenna had started
to write, and before his death he had written more
than two hundred and forty books, treatises, and other works,
(08:05):
and these spanned all kinds of subjects including math, science, philosophy, music,
and poetry. And as we just said today, he is
most known and was most influential for his work in
medicine and philosophy. So we're going to talk about his
philosophy first and his medicine second. His most important philosophical
work is the Katab al Shifa, also called The Cure,
(08:27):
which was an encyclopedia of logic, physics, math, and metaphysics.
And this work was modeled after the work of Aristotle
with a grounding in Islam, and it was translated into
Latin in Spain during the twelfth and thirteen centuries, after
which it became hugely influential in Europe. The physics volume
wasn't just what we think of as physics today. It
(08:49):
also included what we classify more as biology, meteorology, mineralogy,
and even psychology. The math volume also includes geography, a star, eontomy,
and music in addition to the arithmetic and geometry that
would immediately come to mind when we think about math,
and he also wrote about dream interpretations, talisman and alchemy
(09:11):
as well, although in the end he rejected the idea
that base metals could be transmuted into other things As
a philosopher. One of his most notable thought experiments was
called the flying Man, also known as the floating Man,
which reflected on what a completely blank slate of a
person could be aware of. So, in this thought experiment,
(09:32):
imagine that God has just created a fully formed adult
person and kind of a sensory vacuum. This person has
no memory, he has no sensory input at all. None
of his body parts are even touching each other, so
he's not even aware of his own body. So, in
this thought experiment, what would this newly minted person be
aware of. According to Avicenna's philosophy, he would be aware
(09:57):
that he existed. So to Avicenna the Smith, that self
awareness is a fundamental part of life, and that also
suggested to him that the soul is different from the
body because you could be aware of yourself without being
aware of your body. And this was significant because it
was different from much of the theology at the time,
which largely taught that the soul was a material substance
(10:19):
that had an atomic makeup like it was an actual
physical thing. This whole idea also draws a parallel between
humans and God, because Avicenna saw God as a self
thinking intellect. So in Avicenna's view, both humans and God
have this ability for self awareness, and that makes self
awareness something extremely special. According to ancient and medieval philosophy
(10:43):
professor Peter Adamson, this is one of the first times
that philosophy put forth this idea and this connection between
man and God. And Avicenna also created a proof that
he believed proved the existence of God, which takes a
great deal of explaining, so we will link to a
full explanation of it in the show notes rather than
(11:04):
kind of taking you through the proof here. Yes, I
listened to you a thirty minute podcast that was just
an explanation of this proof, So rather than spending thirty
minutes on that, we will of all of the various logic. Yeah,
there's a lot of logic and a lot of sort
of philosophical groundwork that has to be put down first.
That if you're not already familiar with the takes explaining itself.
(11:25):
So um, before we move on to his discussion of medicine,
let's take a moment and talk about our sponsor. That
sounds okay, and now we'll get back to some extremely
important scientific work from very long ago, so Avicenna's most
influential medical work was the five book work The Canon
of Medicine Alcanum fiel tib which was influential both in
(11:49):
his region of the world and in European medical schools.
And some of this medical writing was based on the
Greek physician Galen's idea that of the four humors, which
are blood, flegm, black by and yellow bile, along with
the Greek idea of four elements of earth, air, fire,
and water, and the Cannon of Medicine also draws heavily
on the work of Hippocrates. There's also work on anatomy,
(12:13):
the causes and treatments of diseases, hygiene, medicines, pathology, basically
the whole world of known medicine at the time in
one five volume work. And the fifth book of the
Cannon of Medicine is actually a drug formulary, which was
a completely new idea in the field of medicine at
the time, sort of the first pharmacist manual. Yeah, so
(12:34):
the Canon of Medicine was basically one work that distilled
the whole of medical knowledge into five volumes. So it's
really not at all surprising that it became the mainstay
of medical education and that lasted for hundreds of years.
When schools in Europe finally drifted away from it, it
was also moving away from the whole idea that humors
caused disease when they are out of balance. So basically,
(12:57):
avison Is work was the core of medical education until
medicine moved away from the entire idea that a lot
of it was based on. And although this whole idea
of humors isn't part of mainstream medicine today. Uh. Overall,
Avicenna's medical writing was well tested and it was evidence based.
There's some really solid medical thought in there that still
(13:20):
holds true today. He also kept clinical records which were
intended to be used as an appendix to the canon
of medicine. UH. Those haven't survived until today, but we
do know some specifics about his medical practices. One was
that he recommended wine as a wound dressing, which was
a common treatment in medieval Europe and actually since then.
(13:41):
It contains alcohol can be effective at helping to prevent infection.
He also used reduction techniques like pressure and traction to
treat spinal deformities, which is something that Hippocrates had written of,
and this whole practice disappeared from medicine after Avicenna's time
until a French surgeon picked it up and then nineteenth century.
(14:02):
He also correctly used sweet tasting urine to diagnose diabetes.
So did he taste it? Probably that is the thing
that people would do, uh, and that is definitely identify
sugar in it, definitely an indication that a person could
have diabetes. We know that he performed surgery, and there
are surgical instruments that belonged to him in museums and
(14:25):
within the world of surgery. One of the things that
he did was to describe how to find the healthy
margins of a surgical site when performing an amputation. He
also wrote about how to cut an umbilical cord and
how to clean, swaddle, and feed a newborn baby, so
this is basically all over all kinds of areas of medicine.
At this point. A lot of his writing was also
(14:46):
about generally being healthy, how to get well and stay well,
and it included the effects of recreation, the home, family life,
and all sorts of other factors on human health. So
consequently he's been referred to as the four Runner of
preventive medicine, which is something we take for granted today. Yeah,
he really, uh you know, was the first to put
(15:08):
forth the idea of sort of a holistic health view
versus just treating incidents of health issues. So Avirisona was
extremely influential and extremely important, and unfortunately his life was
not particularly long. At the age of fifty seven, he
was traveling with his patron and he developed colicue, which
he decided to treat himself, and ultimately this wound up
(15:31):
leading to his death. The course of treatment that he
wanted to undergo involved getting eight celery seed enemies a day,
and it's unclear whether this was intentional on the part
of one of his attendants, but the formula that he
gave to himself was prepared to contain more than double
the amount of active ingredient that it was supposed to.
(15:53):
His intestines became ulcerated as a result, and to treat
the ulceration, he used a mild form of opium, and
at this time we know that there was a tampering
that was intentional. A slave laced this opium with an
extra dose. His health started to go downhill, and he
refused to leave his patron. He kept traveling with him,
(16:14):
but his condition got worse and worse, and he finally
died in ten thirty seven, and Amasona is buried in
Hamdan and his tomb, which had fallen into disrepair, was
refurbished in the nineteen fifties and now it's home to
a mausoleum in an eight thousand volume library. Yeah, there's
a big sort of pillared monument there. It's very striking
(16:37):
to look at. As we said earlier, although his his
medical writing is not really part of modern medical thought,
his philosophy is still widely studied among Muslims today. He's
one of those people that's so influential. It's almost surprising
that you don't hear of him. I had never heard
of him before I started. Well, I had heard of
him because I've read the Canterbury Tales in Dante's Inferno,
(16:59):
but his name had not stuck into my head, and
still until I started doing research on this podcast. It's
pretty rare that somebody living at that time would have
been that influential among both Christians and Muslims. Yeah, it's
a it's a really interesting story. I actually do kind
of want to go read his proof, which I have
not yet. I have only listened to the analysis and
(17:20):
description of it that that took like thirty minutes to explain. Um,
perfect lunchtime listening it is. It is pretty pretty perfect
lunchtime listening. There are some awesome philosophy podcasts, some of
which I used as sources for this. We will link
them all up in show notes because I don't have
them noted right in front of me. But yeah, Avicenna,
(17:42):
possibly unknown person credited with the health and were welfare
of much of medieval Europe. All right, do you have
some listener mail to share with us? I do. I
have two pieces of listener mail, and they're both about
the Boston massacre. The first is from Paul, and Paul
writes to us. It's a rather long letter, so I'm
not going to eat all of it. But he writes
about where he listens. He apparently cannot listen to us
(18:04):
while driving because it requires too much of his attention,
but he has been listening while he runs, which is
pretty cool. Uh. Then he says, as a history major
and a trivia aficionado, I particularly look forward to subject
matter that I think I know well. I'm always pleasantly
surprised by the new facts or perspectives that you bring
to the shows. Of course, I love hearing about all
(18:25):
matter of subjects that I knew nothing of. I have
learned more about communicable diseases than I maybe would have
cared to learn on my own. For instance, I did
want to put yeah, I knew you and us both
we did have a whole run of tuberculosis and small box.
I did want to put in my two cents about
your boss the mask per episode. As a proud Bostonian,
(18:46):
I felt it my duty. I was really excited for
this episode as a Colonial America buff and a local
of the Boston area. I did want to add another
cause for tensions that led to the riot, namely the
Quartering Acts, where Boston colonists were forced to house the
British regulars who were sent there to essentially suppress the
Bostonians and their dissatisfaction with the towns and acts. The
(19:06):
soldiers were sent in part as a reaction to the
non importation Acts revived in Boston, where the city refused
to buy any imported goods as a measure that was
adopted across the Northern colonies. Eventually This hit the English
merchants in their wallets, and that had been an effective
method in repealing the stamp acts. Boston's resistance became a
(19:28):
spark that eventually ignited the rebellion. The true presence was
a catalyst that made loyal subjects of the crown rethink
their positions. Imagine four thousand soldiers of occupying a city
of twenty thousand. I know the word massacre is an exaggeration,
but I always wondered why a mob of hundreds didn't
retaliate more violently against eight soldiers after they had shot
into a crowd. Certainly, armed people killing unarmed people is
(19:51):
an act that barrison scrutiny. I always found Adam's description
of the crowd, which is laden with racial overtones, quite
illustrative of how at least some of the four of
others truly did not believe that all men were created equal. Anyway,
enough rambling, keep up the great works, sincerely, Paul, Thank you, Paul.
Uh we did not quite say explicitly that, yes, Adam's
(20:11):
description of the people who writed is quite laced with
judgment and uh bigotry. I think it's the word um
so that is that is letter one about the black
and masker. I have letter to about the Boston massaker,
and then we will kind of talk about both of them. Uh.
The second one is from our Facebook while and it's
(20:32):
from Shawn Sean says Dear Tracy and Holly. I'm a
big fan of the podcast and recently listened to the
episode on the Boston massacre. During the podcast, you mentioned
repeatedly how the term massacre seems an odd choice to
modern ears to describe the event, given the seemingly small
amount of lives cost and the incident compared to what
we are sadly used to today. Well, I agree with
you guys that the use of the term was undoubtedly
(20:53):
driven by political and propaganda aims. I was also curious
that somehow the concept of what would pass as a
massacre in the eighteenth century was influenced by the weapons
available at the time and the carnage they could dispense.
Let's keep in mind that the British soldiers involved in
the event were all armed with large caliber, single shop
muzzle loading muskets. These were inaccurate at best, and even
(21:14):
the best trained soldiers, such as the Heshan's the tie
in another podcast topic, could only be expected to manage
three shots per minute and the best of conditions. So
far I can tell none of the soldiers involved fired
more than once, and some victims were hit multiple times.
Perhaps it is therefore unlikely to have expected a greater
number of casualties than what actually occurred, Although estimates ary
(21:36):
the number of combat dead in the U s Revolution
may have been less than eight thousand people. I do
not mean in any way to diminish the loss of life,
but merely venture the opinion that just as the use
of the term massacre seems uncalled for to us today
because of our cultural conditioning, perhaps our forefathers looked upon
it exactly that because of theirs. At any rate, keep
(21:56):
up the awesome work. Uh. And then he suggests a
podcast episode topic for the future. So thank you also,
Sean Um. We we got a fair amount of flak
from people about how we talked about the Boston mastheaw um.
And after getting this particularly reason the question from Sean,
I went and did some looking because I wondered I
(22:20):
was pretty contextually qualified as a massacre. I was pretty
I was pretty up front at the beginning that I
think of massacres today is something like horrifying and terrible,
and it turns out it's always meant something horrifying and terrible.
So the word massacre comes from French words that relate
to butcher's knives and blocks, so that's what it meant
(22:40):
originally before it became something that meant slaughter. Its first
uses in English came from the sixteenth century and referred
to the bloody massacre at Paris, and that's the math,
the massacre of St. Bartholon New's Day. So to catch
everyone up if you have not heard of this before.
In this massacre, Catherine Demonici, who was Catholic, orchestrated the
(23:03):
murder of the Hugueno nobility who were Protestant. And these
were people who were in Paris for a wedding. It's
not in any way aggressive. Well, I mean there was
tension there, but their their visit to Paris was not
about a wedding specifically, the wedding was of Catherine de
(23:24):
Medici's daughter Margaret, to Henry of Navarre, who was a
Hugueno and would later become Henry the Fourth. So the
final death toll of this massacre was in the thousands,
and a lot of the people who were killed, were
seriously were in their homes or working in their shops
at the time. Some of them were even attendants who
(23:46):
were attending Hugueno aristocrats who were in the louver for
the wedding festivities at a time. So, like, I see
what people like. There are people who felt like we
really treated the massacre and quotation marks too lightly. Massacre
(24:07):
has really always meant something horrifying, involving either massive carnage
or the slaughter of innocent people who were doing nothing.
And that's really not what was happening in Boston on
that day. In Boston on that day, we had a
big group of civilians who surrounded a small group of
armed soldiers and we're like throwing rocks and oyster shells
(24:29):
and things at them and insulting. So I'm not saying
anybody should have gotten shot. It's still a huge tragedy. Yeah,
it's definitely a tragedy. It is also definitely not a
massacre by the definition of massacre um not even the
connotations of massacre, like the actual dictionary definition of massacre.
(24:49):
So while it's definitely not our intent to make light
of anyone death, there was a whole lot of stuff
going on in terms of the factors that d to
the altercation in the first place, and definitely for sure
the fact that American colonial writers portrayed it as a massacre,
(25:09):
specifically as spin later on. Uh, because, like we said,
the first massacre ever described in English, thousands of people
who were in Paris for a wedding, many of them,
a lot of them just were living in Paris doing
their jobs and living in their houses when they got murdered.
So on that cheerful note. So if you would like
(25:34):
to email us and share your thoughts, you can do
so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We also
have some new ways to connect with us are old
ways with new addresses. You can connect with us on
Facebook still but now we're at Facebook dot com slash
missed in History. We're still on Twitter at Misston History.
We're still on Tumbler at Misston History dot tumbler dot com.
(25:55):
And our pinterest has moved and expanded rather significantly, so
you can find us there at pinters dot com slash
mist in history. Do you like to learn a little
bit more about one of the subjects that Avisona wrote
so much about, come to our website. Put the word
math in the search bar, you will find how math Works.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at our website, which is how stuff works dot com
(26:21):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
at how stuff works dot com,
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy Vie Wilson and I and you may
have never heard of today's subject, but Avicenna was one
(00:21):
of the first and probably the most influential Islamic philosopher scientists.
He's listed among the great philosophers in Dante's Inferno, and
in the prologue to the Canary Tales. The doctor of
physic who was in the party has studied his work.
There's also a portrait of him hanging in the hall
of the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris.
(00:44):
He had this expansive, brilliant knowledge, and he was so
methodical and systematic, and the way that he wrote down
in cataloged information that his work in medicine became sought
after basically all over the place. He influenced the field
of medicine throughout the Islamic and Christian medieval worlds, and
his influence in Europe in the field of medicine lasted
(01:07):
well into the seventeenth century, to the point that schools
based their entire medical curricula on his writings. He was
also one of the most important philosophers in history. His work,
which was written mostly in Arabic, was rooted in Islam,
along with Aristotelian and neo Platonist philosophy in the Muslim world.
(01:28):
This philosophy continues to be studied today, and the fact
that Avicenna was influential to both Christians and Muslims makes
him really unique among ancient philosophers and scholars of his time. Today,
his work exists in more than two hundred commentaries, annotations
of bridgements, and translations. So, as we usually do, will
(01:50):
start at the beginning UH and then Farsi. His name
is actually Ibn Sina. In Arabic, it's Abu al al Hussain.
Ibn Sina. Avicenna is actually the medieval latinization of his name.
We're calling him that instead of calling him even Sina
because the overwhelming preponderance of information about him, regardless of
(02:13):
what culture it's written from, UH calls him that. He
became known by that name a very very long time ago.
He was born around nine eighty in a village near Bukara, Iran,
which is now in Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Bukara is
in south central Uzbekistan at a river delta, and it
lay along the Silk Road. Today its center is a
(02:35):
UNESCO World Heritage Site, and at the time it was
the capital, and it was an intellectually rich place to
grow up. This was also the fourth century of the
Islamic calendar, and this part of the world was really
flourishing in knowledge and intellect at this point. His father
was a governor and a scholar as well, and Avicenna
was a very bright and gifted child, and he claimed
(02:58):
to have memorized the higher Koran by the time he
was ten years old. His father's position and the number
of libraries and scholars where they lived meant that his
precociousness was really encouraged and nourished, and much of his
early study was an Aristotilian philosophy. But he surpassed his
teachers when he was quite young, and so he furthered
(03:19):
his education on his own once they no longer had
anything they could teach him. At the age of sixteen,
he turned from studying philosophy to studying medicine, which was
a discipline that he said he found extremely easy. And
when he was still quite young, the Sultan of Bukara,
the city where he was living, got sick and the
court physicians were not able to cure him, but Avicenna
(03:41):
did cure him, but as a reward, the Sultan gave
him access to the royal library, which opened up all
kinds of avenues for his own personal study. Getting access
to books and knowledge through his practice of medicine for
wealthy patrons actually became a pattern that he repeated throughout
his life. The self taught knowledge that he got from
all this was so broad that he also claimed to
(04:03):
have mastered all of the sciences by the age of eighteen.
Brilliant slash a little egotistical yes that comes up often
and writing about him that in addition to being extremely smart,
he knew he was extremely smart and could be kind
of conceited about it. Uh So, when he was a
young man, his father died and he for a while
(04:26):
held an administrative post. It's possible that he succeeded his
father and the governorship, but the records are not entirely
clear on that point. So we knew a fair amount
about Avison's life because he dictated an autobiography to a
protege named Algis Johnny, and this protegee also added additional
biographical information. Some of Avison's own correspondents also survives, but
(04:49):
we don't really have a whole lot of contemporaneous accounts
to balance out this perspective. UM, and the existence of
the autobiography also seems to have had this unintended side
effect of prompting less scholarship about his life. It was
basically like, there's already all this information here, so we
don't need to go on a quest to find more
(05:10):
of it. And especially when it comes to his youth,
the autobiography is all we have uh, and its discussion
of his childhood is really more like the study of
a scholar set out in such a way as to
act as evidence of avice and his own thoughts on
knowledge and wisdom. It basically recounts his learning. It moves
through increasingly difficult material and sequence uh and often his
(05:32):
own without instruction, so he basically kind of does maps
out the natural progression of I learned a little bit,
I learned some harder things. Eventually I had to seek
out my own knowledge because no one could teach me right. So,
rather than sort of being a story about how he
grew up, this autobiography, when it comes to his youth
is more like an illustration of how a person can
(05:53):
acquire wisdom and knowledge through intuition, So it's almost more
like a curriculum for learning things and an example of
having done it, rather than an autobiography as we would
think of it today. And in his adulthood, he was
known to be a gregarious person who loved life and
its pleasures, including drinking and sex. He was witty and charismatic,
(06:15):
and he was often in the company of friends, and
at the same time, as is often the case with geniuses,
he could also have periods of brooding and loneliness. So
go figure, no surprise, really not really, As in many religions,
excessive sex and alcohol consumption were quite frowned upon among
strict Muslims where he lived, So there these same traits
(06:39):
that kind of defined him also put him at odds
with Islamic conventions and social norms, and they earned him
a lot of enemies as well. He had to move
from place to place and from patron to patron as
he rubbed people the wrong way with his flaunting of
religious and social expectations and of you know, being kind
of pretentious and hard to get along way and As
(07:01):
we said earlier, he was also a little conceited and arrogant.
He was brilliant and he knew it, and he was
not afraid to tell people how much he knew or
how very good he was at any particular thing. And
this is the one that always makes me go, oh
no Avicenna. Uh. He was also not shy about embarrassing
and shaming his rivals if they rubbed him the wrong way. Yeah.
(07:21):
So he was pretty outspoken about his greatness and everyone
else's not greatness. Right. He would do things like show
someone a forgery, knowing that it was a forgery, to
see if that person would spot that it was a
fart a forgery in front of others, and when the
person did not spot that it was a forgery, make
(07:42):
fun of them. It's kind of a brilliant jerk. Yeah. But,
as we are about to talk about, extensively, hugely influential
and important, especially in the worlds of philosophy and medicine.
By about the age of twenty one, Avicenna had started
to write, and before his death he had written more
than two hundred and forty books, treatises, and other works,
(08:05):
and these spanned all kinds of subjects including math, science, philosophy, music,
and poetry. And as we just said today, he is
most known and was most influential for his work in
medicine and philosophy. So we're going to talk about his
philosophy first and his medicine second. His most important philosophical
work is the Katab al Shifa, also called The Cure,
(08:27):
which was an encyclopedia of logic, physics, math, and metaphysics.
And this work was modeled after the work of Aristotle
with a grounding in Islam, and it was translated into
Latin in Spain during the twelfth and thirteen centuries, after
which it became hugely influential in Europe. The physics volume
wasn't just what we think of as physics today. It
(08:49):
also included what we classify more as biology, meteorology, mineralogy,
and even psychology. The math volume also includes geography, a star, eontomy,
and music in addition to the arithmetic and geometry that
would immediately come to mind when we think about math,
and he also wrote about dream interpretations, talisman and alchemy
(09:11):
as well, although in the end he rejected the idea
that base metals could be transmuted into other things As
a philosopher. One of his most notable thought experiments was
called the flying Man, also known as the floating Man,
which reflected on what a completely blank slate of a
person could be aware of. So, in this thought experiment,
(09:32):
imagine that God has just created a fully formed adult
person and kind of a sensory vacuum. This person has
no memory, he has no sensory input at all. None
of his body parts are even touching each other, so
he's not even aware of his own body. So, in
this thought experiment, what would this newly minted person be
aware of. According to Avicenna's philosophy, he would be aware
(09:57):
that he existed. So to Avicenna the Smith, that self
awareness is a fundamental part of life, and that also
suggested to him that the soul is different from the
body because you could be aware of yourself without being
aware of your body. And this was significant because it
was different from much of the theology at the time,
which largely taught that the soul was a material substance
(10:19):
that had an atomic makeup like it was an actual
physical thing. This whole idea also draws a parallel between
humans and God, because Avicenna saw God as a self
thinking intellect. So in Avicenna's view, both humans and God
have this ability for self awareness, and that makes self
awareness something extremely special. According to ancient and medieval philosophy
(10:43):
professor Peter Adamson, this is one of the first times
that philosophy put forth this idea and this connection between
man and God. And Avicenna also created a proof that
he believed proved the existence of God, which takes a
great deal of explaining, so we will link to a
full explanation of it in the show notes rather than
(11:04):
kind of taking you through the proof here. Yes, I
listened to you a thirty minute podcast that was just
an explanation of this proof, So rather than spending thirty
minutes on that, we will of all of the various logic. Yeah,
there's a lot of logic and a lot of sort
of philosophical groundwork that has to be put down first.
That if you're not already familiar with the takes explaining itself.
(11:25):
So um, before we move on to his discussion of medicine,
let's take a moment and talk about our sponsor. That
sounds okay, and now we'll get back to some extremely
important scientific work from very long ago, so Avicenna's most
influential medical work was the five book work The Canon
of Medicine Alcanum fiel tib which was influential both in
(11:49):
his region of the world and in European medical schools.
And some of this medical writing was based on the
Greek physician Galen's idea that of the four humors, which
are blood, flegm, black by and yellow bile, along with
the Greek idea of four elements of earth, air, fire,
and water, and the Cannon of Medicine also draws heavily
on the work of Hippocrates. There's also work on anatomy,
(12:13):
the causes and treatments of diseases, hygiene, medicines, pathology, basically
the whole world of known medicine at the time in
one five volume work. And the fifth book of the
Cannon of Medicine is actually a drug formulary, which was
a completely new idea in the field of medicine at
the time, sort of the first pharmacist manual. Yeah, so
(12:34):
the Canon of Medicine was basically one work that distilled
the whole of medical knowledge into five volumes. So it's
really not at all surprising that it became the mainstay
of medical education and that lasted for hundreds of years.
When schools in Europe finally drifted away from it, it
was also moving away from the whole idea that humors
caused disease when they are out of balance. So basically,
(12:57):
avison Is work was the core of medical education until
medicine moved away from the entire idea that a lot
of it was based on. And although this whole idea
of humors isn't part of mainstream medicine today. Uh. Overall,
Avicenna's medical writing was well tested and it was evidence based.
There's some really solid medical thought in there that still
(13:20):
holds true today. He also kept clinical records which were
intended to be used as an appendix to the canon
of medicine. UH. Those haven't survived until today, but we
do know some specifics about his medical practices. One was
that he recommended wine as a wound dressing, which was
a common treatment in medieval Europe and actually since then.
(13:41):
It contains alcohol can be effective at helping to prevent infection.
He also used reduction techniques like pressure and traction to
treat spinal deformities, which is something that Hippocrates had written of,
and this whole practice disappeared from medicine after Avicenna's time
until a French surgeon picked it up and then nineteenth century.
(14:02):
He also correctly used sweet tasting urine to diagnose diabetes.
So did he taste it? Probably that is the thing
that people would do, uh, and that is definitely identify
sugar in it, definitely an indication that a person could
have diabetes. We know that he performed surgery, and there
are surgical instruments that belonged to him in museums and
(14:25):
within the world of surgery. One of the things that
he did was to describe how to find the healthy
margins of a surgical site when performing an amputation. He
also wrote about how to cut an umbilical cord and
how to clean, swaddle, and feed a newborn baby, so
this is basically all over all kinds of areas of medicine.
At this point. A lot of his writing was also
(14:46):
about generally being healthy, how to get well and stay well,
and it included the effects of recreation, the home, family life,
and all sorts of other factors on human health. So
consequently he's been referred to as the four Runner of
preventive medicine, which is something we take for granted today. Yeah,
he really, uh you know, was the first to put
(15:08):
forth the idea of sort of a holistic health view
versus just treating incidents of health issues. So Avirisona was
extremely influential and extremely important, and unfortunately his life was
not particularly long. At the age of fifty seven, he
was traveling with his patron and he developed colicue, which
he decided to treat himself, and ultimately this wound up
(15:31):
leading to his death. The course of treatment that he
wanted to undergo involved getting eight celery seed enemies a day,
and it's unclear whether this was intentional on the part
of one of his attendants, but the formula that he
gave to himself was prepared to contain more than double
the amount of active ingredient that it was supposed to.
(15:53):
His intestines became ulcerated as a result, and to treat
the ulceration, he used a mild form of opium, and
at this time we know that there was a tampering
that was intentional. A slave laced this opium with an
extra dose. His health started to go downhill, and he
refused to leave his patron. He kept traveling with him,
(16:14):
but his condition got worse and worse, and he finally
died in ten thirty seven, and Amasona is buried in
Hamdan and his tomb, which had fallen into disrepair, was
refurbished in the nineteen fifties and now it's home to
a mausoleum in an eight thousand volume library. Yeah, there's
a big sort of pillared monument there. It's very striking
(16:37):
to look at. As we said earlier, although his his
medical writing is not really part of modern medical thought,
his philosophy is still widely studied among Muslims today. He's
one of those people that's so influential. It's almost surprising
that you don't hear of him. I had never heard
of him before I started. Well, I had heard of
him because I've read the Canterbury Tales in Dante's Inferno,
(16:59):
but his name had not stuck into my head, and
still until I started doing research on this podcast. It's
pretty rare that somebody living at that time would have
been that influential among both Christians and Muslims. Yeah, it's
a it's a really interesting story. I actually do kind
of want to go read his proof, which I have
not yet. I have only listened to the analysis and
(17:20):
description of it that that took like thirty minutes to explain. Um,
perfect lunchtime listening it is. It is pretty pretty perfect
lunchtime listening. There are some awesome philosophy podcasts, some of
which I used as sources for this. We will link
them all up in show notes because I don't have
them noted right in front of me. But yeah, Avicenna,
(17:42):
possibly unknown person credited with the health and were welfare
of much of medieval Europe. All right, do you have
some listener mail to share with us? I do. I
have two pieces of listener mail, and they're both about
the Boston massacre. The first is from Paul, and Paul
writes to us. It's a rather long letter, so I'm
not going to eat all of it. But he writes
about where he listens. He apparently cannot listen to us
(18:04):
while driving because it requires too much of his attention,
but he has been listening while he runs, which is
pretty cool. Uh. Then he says, as a history major
and a trivia aficionado, I particularly look forward to subject
matter that I think I know well. I'm always pleasantly
surprised by the new facts or perspectives that you bring
to the shows. Of course, I love hearing about all
(18:25):
matter of subjects that I knew nothing of. I have
learned more about communicable diseases than I maybe would have
cared to learn on my own. For instance, I did
want to put yeah, I knew you and us both
we did have a whole run of tuberculosis and small box.
I did want to put in my two cents about
your boss the mask per episode. As a proud Bostonian,
(18:46):
I felt it my duty. I was really excited for
this episode as a Colonial America buff and a local
of the Boston area. I did want to add another
cause for tensions that led to the riot, namely the
Quartering Acts, where Boston colonists were forced to house the
British regulars who were sent there to essentially suppress the
Bostonians and their dissatisfaction with the towns and acts. The
(19:06):
soldiers were sent in part as a reaction to the
non importation Acts revived in Boston, where the city refused
to buy any imported goods as a measure that was
adopted across the Northern colonies. Eventually This hit the English
merchants in their wallets, and that had been an effective
method in repealing the stamp acts. Boston's resistance became a
(19:28):
spark that eventually ignited the rebellion. The true presence was
a catalyst that made loyal subjects of the crown rethink
their positions. Imagine four thousand soldiers of occupying a city
of twenty thousand. I know the word massacre is an exaggeration,
but I always wondered why a mob of hundreds didn't
retaliate more violently against eight soldiers after they had shot
into a crowd. Certainly, armed people killing unarmed people is
(19:51):
an act that barrison scrutiny. I always found Adam's description
of the crowd, which is laden with racial overtones, quite
illustrative of how at least some of the four of
others truly did not believe that all men were created equal. Anyway,
enough rambling, keep up the great works, sincerely, Paul, Thank you, Paul.
Uh we did not quite say explicitly that, yes, Adam's
(20:11):
description of the people who writed is quite laced with
judgment and uh bigotry. I think it's the word um
so that is that is letter one about the black
and masker. I have letter to about the Boston massaker,
and then we will kind of talk about both of them. Uh.
The second one is from our Facebook while and it's
(20:32):
from Shawn Sean says Dear Tracy and Holly. I'm a
big fan of the podcast and recently listened to the
episode on the Boston massacre. During the podcast, you mentioned
repeatedly how the term massacre seems an odd choice to
modern ears to describe the event, given the seemingly small
amount of lives cost and the incident compared to what
we are sadly used to today. Well, I agree with
you guys that the use of the term was undoubtedly
(20:53):
driven by political and propaganda aims. I was also curious
that somehow the concept of what would pass as a
massacre in the eighteenth century was influenced by the weapons
available at the time and the carnage they could dispense.
Let's keep in mind that the British soldiers involved in
the event were all armed with large caliber, single shop
muzzle loading muskets. These were inaccurate at best, and even
(21:14):
the best trained soldiers, such as the Heshan's the tie
in another podcast topic, could only be expected to manage
three shots per minute and the best of conditions. So
far I can tell none of the soldiers involved fired
more than once, and some victims were hit multiple times.
Perhaps it is therefore unlikely to have expected a greater
number of casualties than what actually occurred, Although estimates ary
(21:36):
the number of combat dead in the U s Revolution
may have been less than eight thousand people. I do
not mean in any way to diminish the loss of life,
but merely venture the opinion that just as the use
of the term massacre seems uncalled for to us today
because of our cultural conditioning, perhaps our forefathers looked upon
it exactly that because of theirs. At any rate, keep
(21:56):
up the awesome work. Uh. And then he suggests a
podcast episode topic for the future. So thank you also,
Sean Um. We we got a fair amount of flak
from people about how we talked about the Boston mastheaw um.
And after getting this particularly reason the question from Sean,
I went and did some looking because I wondered I
(22:20):
was pretty contextually qualified as a massacre. I was pretty
I was pretty up front at the beginning that I
think of massacres today is something like horrifying and terrible,
and it turns out it's always meant something horrifying and terrible.
So the word massacre comes from French words that relate
to butcher's knives and blocks, so that's what it meant
(22:40):
originally before it became something that meant slaughter. Its first
uses in English came from the sixteenth century and referred
to the bloody massacre at Paris, and that's the math,
the massacre of St. Bartholon New's Day. So to catch
everyone up if you have not heard of this before.
In this massacre, Catherine Demonici, who was Catholic, orchestrated the
(23:03):
murder of the Hugueno nobility who were Protestant. And these
were people who were in Paris for a wedding. It's
not in any way aggressive. Well, I mean there was
tension there, but their their visit to Paris was not
about a wedding specifically, the wedding was of Catherine de
(23:24):
Medici's daughter Margaret, to Henry of Navarre, who was a
Hugueno and would later become Henry the Fourth. So the
final death toll of this massacre was in the thousands,
and a lot of the people who were killed, were
seriously were in their homes or working in their shops
at the time. Some of them were even attendants who
(23:46):
were attending Hugueno aristocrats who were in the louver for
the wedding festivities at a time. So, like, I see
what people like. There are people who felt like we
really treated the massacre and quotation marks too lightly. Massacre
(24:07):
has really always meant something horrifying, involving either massive carnage
or the slaughter of innocent people who were doing nothing.
And that's really not what was happening in Boston on
that day. In Boston on that day, we had a
big group of civilians who surrounded a small group of
armed soldiers and we're like throwing rocks and oyster shells
(24:29):
and things at them and insulting. So I'm not saying
anybody should have gotten shot. It's still a huge tragedy. Yeah,
it's definitely a tragedy. It is also definitely not a
massacre by the definition of massacre um not even the
connotations of massacre, like the actual dictionary definition of massacre.
(24:49):
So while it's definitely not our intent to make light
of anyone death, there was a whole lot of stuff
going on in terms of the factors that d to
the altercation in the first place, and definitely for sure
the fact that American colonial writers portrayed it as a massacre,
(25:09):
specifically as spin later on. Uh, because, like we said,
the first massacre ever described in English, thousands of people
who were in Paris for a wedding, many of them,
a lot of them just were living in Paris doing
their jobs and living in their houses when they got murdered.
So on that cheerful note. So if you would like
(25:34):
to email us and share your thoughts, you can do
so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We also
have some new ways to connect with us are old
ways with new addresses. You can connect with us on
Facebook still but now we're at Facebook dot com slash
missed in History. We're still on Twitter at Misston History.
We're still on Tumbler at Misston History dot tumbler dot com.
(25:55):
And our pinterest has moved and expanded rather significantly, so
you can find us there at pinters dot com slash
mist in history. Do you like to learn a little
bit more about one of the subjects that Avisona wrote
so much about, come to our website. Put the word
math in the search bar, you will find how math Works.
You can do all that and a whole lot more
at our website, which is how stuff works dot com
(26:21):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
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