Al-zahrawi early life
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al-Zahrawi
Arab Andalusian physician, surgeon and chemist (936–1013)
Not to be confused with Al-Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri (1951–2022).
Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn al-'Abbās al-Zahrāwī al-Ansari[1] (Arabic: أبو القاسم خلف بن العباس الزهراوي; c. 936–1013), popularly known as al-Zahrawi (الزهراوي), Latinised as Albucasis or Abulcasis (from Arabic Abū al-Qāsim), was an Arab physician, surgeon and chemist from al-Andalus.[2] He is considered one of the greatest surgeons of the Middle Ages.[3][4]
Al-Zahrawi's principal work is the Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices.[5] 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.[6] 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.[ Please download the PDF file to access all images included in this article. Abstract Medicine has a great many “fathers” of the profession; Hippocrates in Ancient Greece, Sushruta in Ancient India, Hua Tuo in Ancient China, Guy de Chauliac and Ambroise Paré in France, Scotsman John Hunter, American William Stewart Halsted, and many, many others in between. One of those “in-between” was Abu al-Qasim Al-Zahrawi, who is also known in the west as “Albucasis. Al-Zahrawi has a great contribution in many surgical fields, including plastic surgery. He described many procedures and invented good number of surgical instruments. Introduction Al-Zahrawi, the Muslim physician is considered one of the great fathers and pioneers of surgery in Europe. We will focus here on his contributions into plastic surgery in particular as he was an innovator in this field. He was born in Al-Zahraa, a little village near Cordoba in the Andalusia region (modern day Spain) in 936 AD. There is very little that rem “Without doubt Albucasis was the chief of all surgeons” Pietro Argallata (died 1423) Before the Islamic era, surgery was considered inferior to medicine, and surgeons were held in lower grade. For the first time, surgery was identified as a distinct part of medicine by AL Zehrawi (see Fig. 1) and was called hand work or iron work. Indeed, the title of the 30th chapter of his impressive book Atasreef was On Surgery or Hand Work. Portrait of Abu Alkasem AL Zehrawi (Albucasis 936–1013), used as cover illustration Full size image Albucasis could not have achieved his high knowledge level without having advanced the current medical fields and without having introduced new significant technical advances. For example, he devised the anesthetic sponge at a time when anesthetic solutions were given as multidoses to the patient to make him unconscious for surgery with the risk of overdosage. Al Zehrawi was the first to use a sponge that steeped in aromatics and soporific and dried to be moistened when require
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Al-Zahrawi (Albucasis) – A Father of Operative Plastic Surgery in Europe
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Abu Alkasem AL Zehrawi (Albucasis 936–1013)