Massage
One of the greatest Persian medics was Avicenna, also known as Ibn Sina, who lived from 980AD to 1037AD. His works included a comprehensive collection and systematisation of the fragmentary and unorganised Greco-Roman medical literature that had been translated Arabic by that time, augmented by notes from his own experiences. One of his books, "Al-Qānūn fī aṭ-Ṭibb" (The Canon of Medicine) has been called the most famous single book in the history of medicine in both East and West. Avicenna excelled in the logical assessment of conditions and comparison of symptoms and took special note of analgesics and their proper use as well as other methods of relieving pain, including massage.
Islamic philosophy
Some orientalists (or those particularly influenced by Thomist scholarship) argued that Avicenna was the first to view existence ("wujud") as an accident that happens to the essence ("mahiyya"). However, this aspect of ontology is not the most central to the distinction that Avicenna established between essence and existence. One cannot therefore make the claim that Avicenna was the proponent of the concept of essentialism "per se", given that existence ("al-wujud") when thought of in terms of necessity would ontologically translate into a notion of the "Necessary-Existent-due-to-Itself" ("wajib al-wujud bi-dhatihi"), which is without description or definition and, in particular, without quiddity or essence ("la mahiyya lahu"). Consequently, Avicenna's ontology is 'existentialist' when accounting for being–"qua"–existence in terms of necessity ("wujub"), while it is essentialist in terms of thinking about being–"qua"–existence in terms of "contingency–"qua"–possibility" ("imkan" or "mumkin al-wujud", meaning "contingent being").