Born in a village outside Bukhara. He had read the whole of Aristotle's Metaphysics before he was eighteen, and went on to write a medical encyclopaedia Europe used for six centuries.
Key achievements
Wrote The Canon of Medicine, a standard European medical text into the 1600s
Wrote The Book of Healing, a complete philosophical and scientific system
Described contagion, clinical trials and the anatomy of the eye centuries early