Surgery · a Light

Only one of his thirty volumes is about surgery

Al-Zahrawi worked at Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba and finished his medical encyclopedia, the Tasrif, around the year 1000. It runs to thirty treatises, and the famous one is the last: surgery, with about two hundred instruments drawn on the page so that a reader could have them made. The other twenty nine are the ordinary business of medicine, on diet, on drugs and how to prepare them, on childbirth, on the teeth, and a long section on what would now be called cosmetics, which he treated as a branch of medicine rather than a vanity. Gerard of Cremona translated the surgical volume at Toledo, and it remained the standard surgical text in Europe for roughly five hundred years, printed in Latin under the name Albucasis.

Al-Zahrawi · Cordoba, c. 936-1013