The Canon of Medicine brought centuries of medical learning into a single organized work. Its author, the Muslim physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (980–1037), known in Europe as Avicenna, completed this encyclopedia in the eleventh century. Its five books examine the human body, the causes and treatment of disease, and medicines.

This incomplete Hebrew manuscript preserves the first book, which introduces the principles underlying medical practice. Written in Spain in the fourteenth century, it records the translation by Yosef ben Yehoshua Lurki. Its brown and red inks distinguish portions of the text, written by hand in Sephardic semi-cursive script.

The translation belongs to a wider movement through which Jewish scholars made Arabic medical learning available in Hebrew. Such books allowed Hebrew readers to study knowledge developed across the Islamic world and helped sustain medicine as an important field of Jewish intellectual life. The Canon also circulated in Latin and became a central teaching text in European medicine.

The surviving volume contains 134 leaves and has a leather binding. It preserves part of a medical tradition that crossed boundaries of language and religion, connecting readers in medieval Spain with the work of an eleventh-century Muslim scholar.