The Law of Natural Healing | Part 2

Avicenna's Canon of Medicine, Volume 1 - General Medicine, Lectures 1-3.

I reject the notion that our ancestors made us what we are today whilst simultaneously steeped in ignorance. After spending a decade in the modern medical paradigm, I believe that there is far more to the traditional medical arts than meets the eye. Many of the foundational concepts of these lost arts seem “pseudoscientific” to the undiscerning mind.

Traditional medicine is not for the uninitiated.

For those unfamiliar with this series, I have been trying to get a grasp on the traditional medical arts. At the same time, I have been looking for scientific discoveries and observations which can account for these thoughts on the nature of life and disease.

The Law of Natural Healing | Part 1

The Canon is a compendium written by the late great Persian polymath ibn Sina - also known as Avicenna.

As you may expect, the first part of this compendium concerns itself with basic principles and the natural sciences upon which this medical art is built.

To give you an overview of Part 1 (The Scope of Medicine and Its Physical Basis):

1. The Scope of Medicine

2. The Elements

3. The Temperaments

4. The Humors

5. Anatomy

6. General Physiology

7. The Breath: Its origin, forms, sources and relation to being

8. Psychology

Today, we will cover the first three lectures. I must admit that the concept of temperament (not by the modern usage of the word) was somewhat difficult to grasp. Unfortunately, many of the translations tend to make this concept more confusing than it need be. As we will find later on in this article, it was a return to the formal Arabic and direct translations of the words used by Avicenna which shed more light on this concept.

Lecture 1 - The Scope of Medicine

Avicenna begins with a description of what medicine is and concerns itself with.

Medicine is the art whereby health is conserved, and when lost…is restored. The “practice” of medicine is not defined as the work conducted by a doctor.

Instead, the practice of medicine is the use of knowledge to form an opinion, with which you can generate a plan to restore or conserve health.

Within this section, Avicenna broadly outlines the four causes of health and disease.

1. Material Causes

   1. The physical body/entity of the living being

   2. Includes aspects like the organs, the humors, the breath, the elements

2. Efficient Causes

   1. Things which prevent or induce change

   2. Include Extrinsic or Intrinsic causes

   3. Extrinsic include: age, sex, job, climate

   4. Intrinsic include: sleep, wakefulness, habits, customs

3. Formal Causes

   1. Three things: Temperament (which every organ has), Faculties and drives, and Structure

   2. Major Faculties:

      1. Vital - preserving the integrity of the breath, sensation, and movement

      2. Natural - governing the nutritive powers of the liver and reproductive organs

      3. Animal - controlling the brain and rational faculty

4. Final Causes

   1. the action and functions

   2. understood only from the knowledge of both faculties/drives and the vital energies (breaths) that are ultimately responsible for them

Avicenna lists causes of the different states of the body, which are evident to most people who take this seriously. Food, drink, air, water, geography, occupation, etc.

He then closes the section with “Things which the medical practitioner should accept without proof and recognize as being true”

• the elements and their number

• existence of temperament and its varieties

• humors, their number and location

• faculties and drives

• vital forces

• the law that a state cannot exist without a cause

The things which are inferred and must be proven by reason are:

• Diseases

  • …their causes

  • symptoms

  • treatments

  • appropriate methods of prevention

Lecture 2 - The Elements

Photo by Courtnie Tosana on Unsplash

Like many classical thinkers before and after Avicenna, the principle elements of the world are not concerned with the atomic classification.

To the practitioner of the traditional medical arts, the elements consist of: earth, water, air, and fire.

I know what you’re thinking. He’s gotta be joking, right?

Everyone knows there are way more than 4 elements.

Allow me to paint you a picture…

Imagine a world in which you can explore and find any element on the periodic table. Elements like hydrogen, fluorine, sulfur or oxygen.

What would that world look like?

Do you imagine it would look like your current world? No.

Very few elements exist in their pure atomic form. Carbon is one exception that exists as graphite and diamond. Another is sulfur, but it exists as a cyclic octo-atomic molecule.

But, most other elements do not.

Iron ore deposits need to be purified by human intervention to get pure iron, and even then it doesn’t last very long. Like almost all solid or liquid elements, iron reacts to form alloys or gets oxidized.

Air needs to be acted on by extensive human intervention before you can isolate a gas which physically and chemically behaves as we predict oxygen does.

Pay close attention to the wording of the above sentence.

Even once you purify air, and undergo the procedures we predict would be necessary to isolate oxygen…it’s not like we can look in a tube and the atoms are holding up “Oxygen” signs.

We assume, based on the behavior of the gas that remains after we refine air…that it is oxygen.

In looking at the world through the lens of the periodic table, we assume that physical nature exists based on how it interacts with our industrial operations.

You need lab equipment to isolate oxygen. You cannot go find it outside.

The greatest thinkers in human history, up until very recently, all understood that the natural world had a few primary elements.

Avicenna even clarifies that when he says “elements” he is not referring to “simple” elements. As if he knew (why wouldn’t he) that what we see in the natural world are actually a mixture of more fine things we cannot see.

Earth. Cold and dry. The center of existence. Stationary. Holds the body together. Tends to return to itself/normal/balance.

Water. Cold and moist. Exists on a gradient toward earth. Can form to any shape without permanence. Moisture protects the dryness.

They say that the liver is a friable organ - meaning that it easily crumbles into smaller pieces or powder. But, this isn’t true. If you have every bought liver from a store, you know that it is a very moist, elastic and slippery organ. When you put pressure on the liver, it doesn’t crumble or collapse very easily. But, once you remove its moisture. Then, it becomes friable.

Air. Hot and moist. Rarefies or renders things fine. Air, as we know it, is a gas with a certain degree of moisture depending on the local climate.

Fire. Hot and dry. Absolute lightness. Matures and intermingles things. Reduces things to its residual particles. Represents the flame and also the Sun, that which makes light.

Earth and water are considered the heavy elements. Air and fire, the light elements.

Notice that each element has its two primary qualities, of which there are four total qualities. Cold, hot, dry and moist. This will be important in the next section.

To finish, I leave you with a quote from an ancient Egyptian Hermetic text called Kore Kosmou:

Isis: Of living things, my son, some are made friends with fire, and some with water, some with air, and some with earth, and some with two or three of these, and some with all.

And…some are made enemies of fire, and some of water, some of earth, and some of air, and some of two of them, and some of three, and some of all.

For instance, son, the locust and all flies flee fire; the eagle and the hawk and all high-flying birds flee water; fish, air and earth; the snake avoids the open air.

It is because one or another of the elements doth form their bodies' outer envelope.

Each soul…is weighted and constricted by these four.

Lecture 3 - The Temperaments

As discussed above, elements have four primary qualities: hot, cold, moist and dry.