Surgery · a Light

A surgeon in Cordoba stitched with thread the body dissolves

Animal gut had been used as thread before al-Zahrawi. What he set down, in the surgical volume of the Tasrif, was its use inside the body, where the point is that the thread is absorbed and nothing has to be taken out again. He describes closing a wound with two needles on one thread, using the mandibles of large ants as clips to hold the edges of a torn intestine, tying off a bleeding vessel, and cauterising. He also describes a family whose boys bled to death from small cuts, which is often read as the earliest clinical account of an inherited bleeding disorder. His warning to readers was blunt: anyone who cuts without knowing anatomy will kill the patient, and in his day almost nobody was taught it.

Al-Zahrawi · Kitab al-Tasrif, c. 1000 CE