al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis)
936 CE–1013 CE · Madinat al-Zahra
Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn al-'Abbās al-Zahrāwī al-Ansari (c. 936–1013), popularly known as al-Zahrawi, Latinised as Albucasis or Abulcasis (from Arabic Abū al-Qāsim), was an Arab physician, surgeon and chemist from al-Andalus. He is considered one of the greatest surgeons of the Middle Ages. Al-Zahrawi's principal work is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. The surgery chapter of this work was later translated into Latin, attaining popularity and becoming the standard textbook in Europe for the next five hundred years. Al-Zahrawi's 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. He pioneered the use of catgut for internal stitches, and his surgical instruments are still used today to treat people. He was the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia and describe an abdominal pregnancy, a subtype of ectopic pregnancy that in those days was a fatal affliction, and was first to discover the root cause of paralysis. He also developed surgical devices for Caesarean sections and cataract surgeries.
Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
Madinat al-Zahra
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Madinat al-Zahra
Madinat al-Zahra was a palace-city built from 936 by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III a few kilometres west of Cordoba in al-Andalus (modern Spain) as the seat of the caliphate; it was sacked and abandoned in the civil wars of the early 11th century and survives as an archaeological site. The physician al-Zahrawi (Albucasis, d. c. 1013), the great surgeon and author of al-Tasrif, took his nisba from al-Zahra and served at the caliphal court.
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Islamic world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.