How Avicenna Was Betrayed?!

How Avicenna Was Betrayed: Why European Medicine Forgot Its Teacher

Avicenna, also known as Ibn Sina, is one of those who stand at the origins of European medicine, even though he himself was not European. His Canon of Medicine was for centuries not a monument but a working textbook: Latin translations from the twelfth century, the universities of Montpellier, Padua, Bologna, Paris, and T;bingen, examinations, and clinical reasoning. European medicine grew not only out of Hippocrates and Galen but also out of Arabic systematization, and the most influential systematizer was precisely Ibn Sina. He gathered the ancient tradition, Persian practice, and Indian motifs into one large picture: the human being, the environment, regimen, disease, and treatment as a single whole.

That is why the word “betrayed” here is not about a conspiracy but about a historical loss. Avicenna proposed a medicine in which the preservation of health was not an appendix to treatment but its foundation. In the Canon he spoke of six necessary things: air, food and drink, sleep and wakefulness, movement and rest, evacuation and retention, and emotions. These are not simply pieces of advice. This is a coherent preventive system: first preserve health, then treat disease. In Europe such medicine was received, but later pushed aside.

Was it betrayed by Freud? No. Freud here is more a convenient symbol than the culprit. Psychoanalysis brought the psyche and emotions back into medicine, but it did so in a separate discipline. The disappearance of coherent prevention from the center of official medicine did not happen because of one person. The reasons were deeper: the change in the model of disease from “regimen and balance” to organ, tissue, and agent; the bacteriological revolution of Pasteur and Koch; the separation of public health and clinical medicine; hospital specialization; laboratory standardization of education after the Flexner Report; the economics of medicine, which pays for procedures, operations, and medicines but pays poorly for a long conversation about sleep, food, movement, and emotions; and finally reductionism, which pushed lifestyle and the psyche outside the brackets of “real” medicine.

But Avicenna also had another line that is rarely remembered today. His medicine is connected with Ayurveda, not by direct copying but by historical kinship and indirect influence. In Baghdad, Indian physicians and texts belonged to the intellectual circle; the Persian medical tradition absorbed Indian medicines, regimens, and ideas about seasonality. In the Canon there are Indian remedies and references to Indian practice. The main similarity, however, is prevention as a way of life: daily and seasonal prescriptions, moderation in food, sleep, movement, purification, and attention to emotions. Avicenna was not an “Ayurvedic physician,” but he stood at the crossroads of Greek, Persian, and Indian medicine and synthesized them in such a way that this synthesis became European.

Today prevention has not died. It has remained in public health, hygiene, epidemiology, preventive medical examinations, and sanatorium-resort care, and it is returning as lifestyle medicine, preventive cardiology, and occupational health. But it has returned in fragments, not as a coherent Canon. We are again learning what Avicenna already held together: health is not the absence of a diagnosis but a regimen of life, the environment, the psyche, and the body in one space. Was Avicenna betrayed? Rather, we took his system apart into convenient pieces and forgot that it had once been a single whole. Freud is not to blame. The blame lies with medicine, which for too long paid for disease and too little for its prevention.

Keywords: Avicenna # Ibn Sina # Canon of Medicine # European medicine # prevention # preventive medicine # Ayurveda # history of medicine # lifestyle # Freud # biomedical model # lifestyle medicine