Al-Zahrawi Compiles a Guide to Surgery

Around the year 1000, the Andalusian physician Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi completed the Kitab al-Tasrif, a massive thirty-volume encyclopedia summing up nearly five decades of medical instruction and practice. Working in the vicinity of Cordoba, where he served as a court doctor during the reign of Caliph Al-Hakam II, al-Zahrawi addressed a wide range of disciplines including pharmacology, ophthalmology, pathology, and childbirth. While biographical records concerning his daily life remain scarce because of later regional conflicts, his extensive written output established a detailed operational system for medicine in Muslim Iberia.

His name points to Madinat al-Zahra, the caliphal city founded near Cordoba in 936, which is generally taken to be his birthplace. According to the historian of science Emilia Calvo, the Tasrif drew on more than 60 earlier authorities, among them Galen, al-Razi and Ibn al-Jazzar, and in places relied heavily on the seventh-century Alexandrian physician Paul of Aegina. Most of its thirty books dealt with pharmacology and the preparation of drugs from plant, mineral and animal substances, alongside general medicine, diet and a survey of some 325 diseases. One of these pharmacological books also reached Europe, translated into Latin in the late thirteenth century as the Liber Servitoris.