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Al-Zahrawi's Two Hundred Instruments
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Show notes
The surgeon of Cordoba
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi practised in Cordoba in the late 900s and wrote the Kitab al-Tasrif, a medical encyclopaedia in thirty volumes. The last volume, on surgery, is illustrated with around two hundred instruments and was the standard European surgical text for five centuries. Rania picks the pages that matter most.
- The illustrated instruments and which ones are still on a surgical tray today
- Catgut sutures, cautery and the ethics he wrote about operating
- His case notes and what they reveal about patients in Cordoba
- The Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona and its long afterlife
- A short detour on his advice to students about humility
Manuscript images are on the episode page with permission of the Bodleian Library.
Transcript
Welcome back to Astrolabes and Ink. I am Rania Tarawneh, and this week we are in Cordoba, in the 980s, in the clinic of a surgeon called Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi. He wrote a medical encyclopaedia in thirty volumes, and the last volume is the one that changed the world. It is about surgery, and it is illustrated with around two hundred instruments, drawn so clearly that a modern surgeon can recognise most of them. Forceps, scalpels, bone saws, a syringe, and sutures made from animal gut that dissolve on their own. Translated into Latin, it stayed on European teaching desks for five hundred years. We go through the plates, we read some of his case notes, and we spend a few minutes on the advice he gave students about not operating when you are unsure. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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