Al-Zahrawi

Abū al-Qāsim al-Zahrāwī practiced medicine in al-Andalus during the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, working in an era when the Islamic world led in medical knowledge. His thirty-volume encyclopedia, the Kitab al-Tasrif, synthesized surgical techniques with an emphasis on practical procedure. The surgery volume, translated into Latin, became the standard teaching text across Europe for the next five hundred years. He pioneered catgut for internal stitching, identified hemophilia as hereditary, described abdominal pregnancy, and traced certain paralyses to spinal injury. He also designe…