text: Avicenna (980–1037 AD) was a Persian philosopher, physician, and Islamic scholar. He wrote about 40 books on medicine. His two most famous books are The Canon of Medicine and The Book of Healing, used in medieval universities as medical textbooks. He did much to popularize the connection between Greek and Arabic medicine, translating works by Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen into Arabic. Avicenna stressed the importance of diet, exercise, and hygiene. He also was the first to describe parasitic infection, to use urine for diagnostic purposes and discouraged physicians from the practice of surgery because it was too base and manual.