Dot Porter, Curator, Digital Research Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library, offers a video orientation to Penn Library’s LJS 359, Liber canonis, by Avicenna. This manuscript includes sections from Books 1 and 2 of Avicenna’s 11th-century comprehensive medical work, as translated into Latin in the 12th century by Gherardo da Cremona. Book 1 addresses medicine generally; the section in the manuscript is from the first treatise and concerns the four elements. Book 2 is devoted to materia medica.

You can see the full online facsimile of this work in Penn in Hand. and you can download all its images and metadata at OPenn. You can also download a copy of this video and an eBook version of the manuscript (epub format) from ScholarlyCommons, the University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository.