Al-Zahrawi's Instruments
The Islamic Golden AgeA Surgeon From the Palace City
Abu al-Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas al-Zahrawi takes his name from Madinat al-Zahra, the palace city Abd al-Rahman III began building outside Cordoba in 936. That is also, roughly, where historians place his birth - not because a record survives, but because the name has to come from somewhere. Almost nothing else about his life is fixed. Ibn Hazm, born in 994 and still a young man when al-Zahrawi died, later listed him among the finest physicians of al-Andalus; a fuller notice comes from Ibn Hazm's student al-Humaydi, who was born around 1029, well after al-Zahrawi's death. Both notices are written decades after the fact. He is usually called physician to the caliph al-Hakam II, though the evidence for that is thin, and even his death is dated anywhere from 1009 to 1013. What we have instead of a biography is his book.
Thirty Treatises, One Working Lifetime
The book is al-Tasrif li-man ajiza an al-ta'lif - roughly, the arrangement, for anyone unable to compile one for himself. It runs to thirty treatises and was, he says, the yield of a working lifetime: diet, drugs, the preparation of simple medicines, even a section on cosmetics handled as medicine rather than vanity. Surgery is the thirtieth and last part, and it is the part that travelled. He divides it in three - cauterising with the hot iron; cutting, which covers wounds, bloodletting, bladder stone and obstetric work; then bone-setting, fractures and dislocations. He opens by complaining that surgery in his own country had all but died out, and warning that a man who operates without knowing anatomy will kill his patient.
Why He Drew the Tools
Words had failed. Greek surgical writing reached al-Andalus as text, and text let readers picture the wrong object, so al-Zahrawi drew: roughly two hundred instruments across the treatise - scalpels, probes, hooks, bone saws, forceps, a device for crushing a stone inside the bladder. The prose keeps turning to the figures - and this is its picture - which is the main reason scholars think the drawings are his rather than a copyist's addition. No earlier surviving surgical work sets out its instruments this way, though illustrated Greek medical manuscripts did exist before him. The catch: our oldest copies are two or three centuries younger than the author, made by scribes who were not surgeons, and the shapes drift from manuscript to manuscript.
Borrowed, Tested, Added
His backbone is Greek. The sixth book of Paul of Aegina, a seventh-century compendium out of Alexandria, stands behind much of the surgery, and Galen behind the anatomy - and al-Zahrawi says so rather than hiding it. What he adds is practice. He ties off bleeding vessels, packs and dresses wounds, stitches internal ones with animal gut because the body absorbs it, and is unusually willing to record what he had not done. He had never performed a tracheotomy, he writes, but he had once sewn up the throat of a servant girl who cut it herself, and she recovered - proof, he argues, that such a wound need not be fatal. He also describes a family whose boys bled to death from small cuts, a passage often read now as haemophilia.
The City Falls, the Book Travels
Cordoba's caliphal library was famous even then: Ibn Hazm is quoted, centuries later, saying its catalogue alone filled forty-four volumes, and later writers put the collection at 400,000 books - some retellings say 600,000. None of these figures can be checked, and the spread between them is the point. Under al-Mansur the library was purged of works on the ancient sciences, and in the civil war that began in 1009 what remained was broken up and sold off; Madinat al-Zahra itself was sacked in 1010 and abandoned as a ruin. Al-Zahrawi died around 1013, into that wreckage. The surgery survived because it moved - Gerard of Cremona turned it into Latin at Toledo in the later 1100s, Guy de Chauliac quoted it constantly in 1363, and it was still being printed, Arabic beside Latin, at Oxford in 1778.
Key Dates to Remember
- 936 — Abd al-Rahman III begins building Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba. Al-Zahrawi's birth is placed near this year on the strength of his name, not of any record.
- 961-976 — Reign of al-Hakam II, at whose court al-Zahrawi is usually placed, and to whose Cordoba library the reported forty-four-volume catalogue belongs.
- c. 1000 — Al-Tasrif is completed - thirty treatises, closing with the surgery and its roughly two hundred drawn instruments.
- 1010-c. 1013 — Madinat al-Zahra is sacked in the fitna and left a ruin; al-Zahrawi dies around 1013, his death variously dated from 1009.
- later 1100s - 1778 — Gerard of Cremona translates the surgery into Latin at Toledo; Guy de Chauliac leans on it in 1363; an Arabic-and-Latin edition is printed at Oxford in 1778.