Islamic medical poetry

Along with calligraphy and architecture, poetry is one of the major Islamic art forms. Mystical poetry, like that of Jalaluddin Rumi, is very popular in the West right now, but it is not the only kind of poetry produced by Muslims. While searching for good web resources on Islamic poetry, I stumbled upon a little-known genre: medical poetry. Medical poetry was not an attempt to wax poetic about the joys of medicine. Rather, it was meant as a teaching tool, to put the basic concepts of medicine in a form that was easy for students to remember. The best-known example of this was Poem on Medicine by the great philosopher and physician Avicenna (Abu Ali Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, 980-1037).The poem does not seem to be available online but the link provides some information about it. There are a large number of biographies of Avicenna available online, some focused on his career as a physician and some focused on his career as a philosopher. You can also check out this large list of links about Islamic medicine.