University medical textbook: Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine became a standard medical text in European universities. Ibn Sina, or “Avicenna” as he became known in Europe, flourished around 1000. At the bottom of the frontispiece, the center vignette ranks Ibn Sina among the four greatest ancient physicians. Twenty years earlier, in 1588, the same printer issued the first collected edition of the Hippocratic corpus by Mercuriale. The frontispiece was recycled for this edition of Ibn Sina, showing the same vignettes from the history of ancient medicine except for an expanded central title area.