Al-Zahrawi's illustrated surgery

To drain the abdomen in dropsy, al-Zahrawi replaced the straight cannula of earlier writers with one cut at a bevel. For a stone stuck in the urethra he passed a fine drill up the urinary passage, and to open an abscess without alarming a nervous patient he designed a knife that could be kept hidden. These instruments appear in the last book of his medical encyclopedia, the Tasrif, which he wrote around the year 1000.

Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas al-Zahrawi, known in Latin as Albucasis, was born in 936 in al-Zahra, a suburb six miles northwest of Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain. He rarely travelled, spent most of his life practising in his home town and died in 1013. The Tasrif ran to 30 books. The first set out general principles; the second, far larger than any other, covered the symptoms and treatment of 325 diseases from head to foot; most of the rest dealt with drugs and diet. The title means, roughly, an arrangement of medical knowledge for one who cannot compile a book for himself.

The surgical book had three parts: cautery, incisions and bloodletting, and bone-setting. Al-Zahrawi combined Greek and Roman teaching with his own observations, modified older instruments and designed new ones, and drew them in detail, although scribes often misunderstood the drawings when they copied the text. He described a vaginal speculum and forceps, though the forceps were not meant for live births. A 2007 account by Samir Amr and Abdelghani Tbakhi credits him with more than 200 surgical tools. Surgery then had neither antisepsis nor anaesthesia, and most operations followed accidents or battle wounds.

The surgical book often circulated on its own. About two centuries after it was written, Gerard of Cremona translated it into Latin in Toledo, and the Tasrif became part of medical teaching in Europe for centuries. The French surgeon Guy de Chauliac, who died in 1368, quoted al-Zahrawi more than 200 times. Printed editions of the surgery appeared at Venice in 1497, at Basel in 1541 and at Oxford in 1778, the last in Arabic and Latin.