The Canon of Medicine

Approximate completion of Avicenna's Canon of Medicine

The Canon was not launched on a publication day. It was a manuscript assembled during Avicenna's westward movement through three Iranian cities, and no 1025 release is documented.

Five books, finished on the road west

The year usually attached to Avicenna's Arabic Kitab al-Qanun fi al-tibb is 1025, though nothing about the Canon happened on a particular day. He began it in Gurgan (Jorjan) in northern Iran, continued it in Rayy, and completed it in Hamadan.

The finished encyclopedia was organized into five books: general principles, simple drugs, diseases of individual organs, diseases affecting more than one part, and compound remedies.

The Library of Congress counts roughly 800 individual drugs arranged in Book 2 and some 650 compound remedies in Book 5.

Why 1025 is a range rather than a year

Reputable accounts give the completion variously as 1025, circa 1025, or somewhere between 1020 and 1025. Other scholarly accounts put it more than a decade earlier — c. 1012, or approximately 1010–1015, with the first of the five books finished in 1015. No dated colophon settles the conflict.

The National Library of Medicine's catalogue describes the work as composed over an extended period while Avicenna moved from Gurgan to Rayy and then Hamadan.

'Publishing' is the wrong word for what happened

There was no publication event to date. No identifiable 1025 publication, edition or public release is documented, because the Canon originated in manuscript culture.

Its extensive copying, translation and institutional influence belong to the work's later reception history. Gerard of Cremona translated it into Latin at Toledo in the second half of the twelfth century, and European medical education took the work up after that.

What emerged in Hamadan was a completed five-book Arabic manuscript work.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. Conventionally dated here; the research places it at ~1025.

What the sources leave uncertain

The exact completion year is not securely documented: reputable accounts variously say 1025, circa 1025, or between 1020 and 1025.
“Publishing” is misleading for this event. No identifiable 1025 publication, edition or public release is documented; the work originated in manuscript culture.
The National Library of Medicine identifies Gurgan in northern Iran—not Gorganj in Khwarazm—as the place where composition began.