Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health.
Interpretation
Understanding the causes of illness and wellness is essential in medicine.
Avicenna emphasizes the importance of comprehending the underlying causes of both sickness and health in the field of medicine. This perspective encourages a holistic approach to healthcare where physicians not only treat symptoms but also seek to understand the root causes of ailments to promote true healing.
In practice
During a medical conference, a speaker quoted Avicenna to highlight the need for preventative measures in healthcare.
Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.
Is it the fault of wine if a fool drinks it and goes stumbling into darkness?
As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every mental form.
An ignorant doctor is the aide-de-camp of death.
It is in the nature of water ... to become transformed into earth through a predominating earthy virtue; ... it is in the nature of earth to become transformed into water through a predominating aqueous virtue.
Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.
If the government regulates against use of drones or stem cells or artificial intelligence, all that means is that the work and the research leave the borders of that country and go someplace else.
People think if you have deciphered the genome of humans that you can change everything. But you cannot change everything, because you do not know what the genes mean, and you have no methods for changing them, and you can't do experiments with humans like you can with animals.
Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.
The roads by which men arrive at their insights into celestial matters seem to me almost as worthy of wonder as those matters in themselves.
I'm in favor of changing the destination of humans. There are a lot of manned missions that can be done, but not in the direction of the moon.
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