In the surgical volume of his great encyclopedia, az-Zahrāwī did something no one had done before him. He drew the instruments. Around two hundred of them, depicted and described in his own hand, so that a surgeon a thousand kilometers away could learn the craft. Knowledge was not to die in the mind of one individual. It was to be passed on.
Abū al-Qāsim az-Zahrāwī, known in the West as Albucasis, lived from about 936 to 1013 in Madīnat az-Zahrāʾ near Córdoba, in Umayyad al-Andalus in the time of ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān III and al-Ḥakam II. His work Kitāb at-Taṣrīf comprised thirty volumes. The last and most consequential dealt with surgery.
What it contains shapes medicine to this day. The suture with catgut, the absorbable thread, is still used in every operating theater. He described how to crush a bladder stone without cutting. He developed cauterization, obstetrics, dentistry. Translated by Gerard of Cremona, his work remained for five hundred years the most important surgical textbook of the European universities.
Córdoba was then the lamp of knowledge, with its schools, its hospitals, and al-Ḥakam’s enormous library. In this soil az-Zahrāwī grew. And he understood surgery as what it is at its core, as Khidma, as service. About his own learning he wrote a sentence of great humility.
“Whatever I know I owe solely to the tireless reading of the ancients and the desire to understand them, and to this I have added the observation and experience of my whole life.”
az-Zahrāwī, preface of the Kitāb at-Taṣrīf
He warned his students against overestimating themselves and urged them to deliberation and to the greatest effort in the service of the sick.
Itqān is ʿibāda
The hand that cuts must be the gentlest hand. Surgery is the most immediate service a physician can render, for to lay the knife to the body of a brother in order to take his pain away is an Amāna of the highest rank. az-Zahrāwī reminds us that Itqān, the perfection of the craft, is itself a form of ʿibāda. Whoever does his work with Iḥsān thereby serves Allah.