Can all medicine fit in one book?

That time, that place

Bukhara. Ibn Sina had made his name as a physician by eighteen. For curing the ruler he was granted the run of the royal library, and there, he says, he read whatever came to hand.

Why this question

The trouble was not scarcity but scatter. Greek medicine, Persian medicine, Indian medicine, and what Arab physicians had newly added all sat in separate books.

To find what to look for in a patient you had to search through dozens of them — impossible with a patient who cannot wait.

What was found

So he gathered it all into one system: the Canon of Medicine, in five books — general principles, materia medica, individual diseases, diseases affecting the whole body, and compound remedies. What matters is not the bulk but the structure. It was arranged so you could find where to look.

Inside it are rules for testing a drug. Test it unmixed. Test it against a single disease. Require that the result repeat across cases, not appear once. And confirm in humans, since what holds in animals may not carry over.