Al-Zahrawi
- Lived
- c. 936 - 1013 CE
- Read next
- Meaning of the name Al-Zahrawi
Who was Al-Zahrawi? The Andalusian physician of Cordoba who wrote the medical encyclopedia Al-Tasrif, whose thirtieth book on surgery was the standard European surgical text for six hundred years and invented dozens of surgical instruments still used today.
The Andalusian physician of Cordoba who wrote the medical encyclopedia Al-Tasrif, whose thirtieth book on surgery was the standard European surgical text for six hundred years and invented dozens of surgical instruments still used today.
Life
Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn Abbas al-Zahrawi was born near Cordoba, in the town of Madinat al-Zahra built by the Umayyad caliphs of Al-Andalus. He served as physician to the Caliph al-Hakam II.
His masterwork is Kitab al-Tasrif li-man Ajaza an al-Talif (The Method of Medicine for Him Who Cannot Compile), a thirty-volume medical encyclopedia. The first twenty-nine volumes cover diet, pharmacology, physiology, and general medicine.
The thirtieth volume is titled Kitab al-Jarahat, the Book of Surgery. It is illustrated with more than two hundred surgical instruments that al-Zahrawi designed. Many of these instruments are still in use today, essentially unchanged: the surgical scissors, forceps, retractors, tonsillectomy tools, catheters, and instruments for extracting foreign bodies.
Al-Zahrawi described procedures for cauterization, ligation of arteries, extraction of arrows, cesarean deliveries, dental prostheses, cataract surgery, the removal of kidney and bladder stones, tracheotomy, and craniotomy. He described using catgut for sutures, an innovation of his own.
Kitab al-Tasrif was translated into Latin as Chirurgia by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century. It became the standard European surgical textbook. He is called Albucasis or Abulcasis in Latin sources.
Stories
Each story is drawn from the classical Islamic sources.