The great Persian (Iranian) philosopher Avicenna was born in Afshana, near Bocchara (Bukhara), in Turkistan. He studied the works of Porphyry, Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, and Aristotle, along with the Koran, with a distinct eye for the art of healing; he practiced not as a theoretical philosopher but as a physician; his first works were his medical Canon and his Healing, the latter of which was an encyclopedic synthesis of logic, metaphysics, physics, philosophy, and medicine, which influenced scholars on both continents. He became a renown teacher and personal physician to Persian kings and princes, and his works were standard fare well into the seventeenth century.
