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Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn Abbas Al-Zahrawi (known in the West as Albucasis) was born at Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba in Islamic Spain on 936 CE and died in 1013 CE. He descended from the Ansar tribe of Arabia who had settled earlier in Spain.
His outstanding contribution to medicine is his encyclopaedic work Al-Tasrif li-man ‘ajaza ‘an al-ta’lif, a long and detailed work in thirty treatises. The Al-Tasrif, completed about 1000 CE, was the result of almost fifty years of medical practice and experience.
Al-Tasrif is an illustrated encyclopaedia of medicine and surgery in 1500 pages. The contents of the book show that Al-Zahrawi was not only a medical scholar, but a great practicing physician and surgeon. His book influenced the progress of medicine and surgery in Europe after it was translated into Latin in the late 12th century, by Gerard of Cremona, and then afterwards into different European languages.
Of all the contents of Al-Zahrawi’s Al-Tasrif, book 30 on surgery became the most famous and had by far the widest and the greatest influence. Translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187), it went into at least ten Latin editions between 1497 and 1544. The last edition was that of John Channing in Oxford (1778), which contained both the original Arabic text and its Latin translation on alternate pages. Almost all European authors of
surgical texts from the 12th to the 16th centuries referred to Al-Zahrawi’s surgery and copied from him.
The 300 pages of the book on surgery represent the first book of this size devoted solely to surgery, which at that time also included dentistry and what one may term surgical dermatology. Here, Al-Zahrawi developed all aspects of surgery and its various branches, from ophthalmology and diseases of the ear, nose, and throat, surgery of the head and neck, to general surgery, obstetrics, gynaecology. Military medicine, urology, and orthopaedic surgery were
also included. He divided the surgery section of Al-Tasrif into three part:
1. on cauterization (56 sections);
2. on surgery (97 sections),
3. on orthopaedics (35 sections).
It is no wonder then that Al-Zahrawi’s outstanding achievement awakened in Europe a hunger for Arabic medical literature, and that his book reached such proeminence that a modern historian considered it as the foremost text book in Western Christendom.
In his native city of Cordoba there is a street called ‘Al-Bucasis’ named after him. Across the river Wadi Al-Kabir on the other side of the city, in the Calla Hurra Museum, his instruments are displayed in his honour. As a tribute, his 200 surgical instruments were reproduced by Fuat Sezgin and exhibited in 1992 in Madrid’s Archaeological Museum. A catalogue, El-legado Cientifico Andalusi, published by the museum, has good colour photos and
manuscripts, some of which are on Al-Zahrawi’s achievements, legacy and influence.
Subhanallah. What an amazing contribution our hero has brought to out Islamic civilization. Its time for us to start appreciating their hardwork.
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