Modern surgical truth : Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas Al-Zahrawi (936–1013), also known in the West as Abulcasis, was an Arab physician who lived in Al-Andalus. He is considered the greatest medieval surgeon to have appeared from the Islamic World, and has been described by some as the father of modern surgery. His greatest contribution to medicine is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. His pioneering contributions to the field of surgical procedures and instruments had an enormous impact in the East and West well into the modern period, where some of his discoveries are still applied in medicine to this day. Al-Tasrif was later translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century, and illustrated. For perhaps five centuries during the European Middle Ages, it was the primary source for European medical knowledge, and served as a reference for doctors and surgeons. Abu Al-Qasims al-Tasrif described both what would later became known as Kochers method for treating a dislocated shoulder and Walcher position in obstetrics. Al-Tasrif described how to ligature blood vessels almost 600 years before Ambroise Paré, and was the first recorded book to document several dental devices and explain the hereditary nature of haemophilia. He was also the first to describe a surgical procedure for ligating the temporal artery for migraine, also almost 600 years before Pare recorded that he had ligated his own temporal artery for headache that conforms to current descriptions of migraine. Abu al-Qasim also described the use of forceps in vaginal deliveries. He introduced over 200 surgical instruments. Many of these instruments were never used before by any previous surgeons. Hamidan, for example, listed at least twenty six innovative surgical instruments that Abulcasis introduced. His use of catgut for internal stitching is still practised in modern surgery. The catgut appears to be the only natural substance capable of dissolving and is acceptable by the body. Abu al-Qasim also invented the forceps for extracting a dead fetus, as illustrated in the Al-Tasrif. In the Photo: (A): Illustrations of surgical instruments from a 13th-century Arabic copy of al-Zahrawi’s On Surgery. (B): Al-Zahrawi’s annotated illustrations of surgical instruments were circulating in Europe in Latin translation in the 14th century.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 14:10:55 +0000
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