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Introduction INTRODUCTION 'ALBUCASIS' is probably the commonest of the many forms2 into which medieval Europe distorted the name of the Arab surgeon Abu '1-Qasim Khalaf ibn 'Abbas al-Zahrawi. Surprisingly little is positively known about him. The last element of his name indicates his birthplace as al-Zahra', the royal city five miles west of Cordova, founded A.D. 936 by the Caliph 'Abd al-Rahman III al-Nasir (r. 912-61), the eighth Umayyad ruler of Spain, and from this we derive a terminus post quem for the date of his birth. His patronymic tells us that his father's name was 'Abbas. The additional name al-Ansari given to him in the manuscripts of the seventeenth treatise of his work3 shows that his family claimed to have originated in Medina. There is no contemporary evidence for the later stories that make him personal physician to 'Abd al-Rahman III, or his son and successor al- Hakam II al-Mustansir (r. 961-76), or the Chamberlain Ibn Abi 'Amir al- Mansur (d. 1002). We might suppose that he himself refrained from men- tioning any such appointment out of modesty, but it is unlikely that all the copyists of his manuscript would have followed his example. On the level of hearsay, it is worth recording what the scribe of the Veliuddin MS. says about him (fol. 228b): 'I have been told that al-Zahrawi—God's mercy on him—was extremely ascetic; that half of his work every day he did without fee, as charity; and that he wrote this compendium for his sons over a period of forty years.' We can be fairly sure that the 'sons' for whom Albucasis wrote his book were the generation following him in the medical profession; the evidence for this is that although he begins by addressing them conventionally in the plural he soon lapses into the singular, which he would scarcely do if he had in mind the sons of his body. As to the date of his death, there is no reason to suppose that Leo Africanus was far wrong in giving this as A.H. 404/A.D. 1013.4 ' For the sources for our knowledge of our author's life, of the extant Arabic manuscripts of his work, and of Western translations and studies of it, see Sami Khalaf Hamarneh and Glenn Sonnedecker, A Pharmaceutical View of Abulcasis al-Zahrawl in Moorish Spain (Leiden, 1963). The title is far narrower than the matters discussed in the book. 2 Hamarneh and Sonnedecker (op. cit., p. 17) give a long list of these, for which they do not claim completeness. To it may be added: Albuchasis, Bulcasis, Albucasius, Alsarabius, Afararius, and Ezaharagui. 3 Hamarneh and Sonnedecker, op. cit., p. 15. 4 For a discussion of the evidence, see Hamarneh and Sonnedecker, op. cit., pp. 18-22. vii Leo's brief biography of our author, in his De viris quibusdam illustribus apud Arabes, is often alluded to by writers on Albucasis but seldom quoted, so it is here given in full'De Ezaharagui Medico. Ezaharagui fuit medicus Mansori, Cordubas Consiliarij, & proximus Rasis, qui composuit Librum, sicut Canon Avicennae in arte Medicinae, utilissimum quidem: quo etiam adhuc Maumedani Medici utuntur. Vixit autem annos centum & unum. Qui obijt anno Belli Cordubce, de Elhegira anno quadringentesimo quarto.' The statement that he lived 101 years must be rejected, not that it is intrinsically impossible, especially as 101 hijri years are only 97 solar years, but because it would make Albucasis twenty years old when al-Zahrä' was founded and he would not have been known as al-Zahrawi unless he were born there. The Surgery to which the present volume is devoted is the last2 of the thirty treatises comprising his Kitäb al-tasrif li-man 'ajiza 'an al-ta'ällf. This title is hard to render into elegant English; a literal and inelegant translation is: 'The Book of enabling him to manage who cannot cope with the compilations', the implication being that it is a self-contained manual of the medical art in all its branches; the user need refer to no other work. The first treatise contains information on 'the elements and the mixtures' (i.e. the various sorts of temperament), the compounding of drugs, and anatomy. The second contains 'the sections on diseases and their symptoms, and instructions for their treatment'. In size it is fractionally larger than the Surgery (which accounts for one-fifth of the whole work). The first and second treatises were translated in the mid-thirteenth century into Hebrew and thence into Latin, appearing at Augsburg in 1519 under the title of Liber theoricae nec nonpracticae Alsaharavii. The twenty-sixth treatise is on 'diets for the sick and many of the healthy, arranged according to diseases'. The twenty-ninth is on 'the naming of drugs in various languages, how one can be used in place of another, the stabilization of drugs, compounded and otherwise, the explanation of the compound names occurring in medical books, and weights and measures'. The other twenty-five treatises, totalling some forty-six per cent of the whole, deal with materia medica, the prepara- tion and uses of drugs, pills, ointments, plasters, and so on. The twenty- eighth treatise, on 'the improvement of medicines, the burning of mineral stones and the medical uses thereof', was translated via Hebrew into Latin at the end of the thirteenth century and became widely known in Europe 1 From J. H. Hottinger, Bibliothecarius quadripartitus (Zürich, 1664), p. 256. 1 Of the two Bodleian manuscripts, Huntington 156 calls it 'the tenth treatise', while Marsh 54 calls it 'the eleventh part'. viii under the title of Liber Servitoris, particularly after its first printing, by Nicolaus Jenson, at Venice in 1471. The thirtieth treatise, the Surgery, is the first rational, complete, and illustrated treatment of its subject. The author's declared purpose was to revive the art of surgery as taught by 'the Ancients', the content of which term ranges from Hippocrates to Paulus Aegineta, whose lifetimes were separated by some eleven hundred years. Nowhere is his reverence for his predecessors more plainly indicated than at the end of III, 1 (i.e. Chapter One of Book Three), where, speaking of 'some ignorant bone-setters' who break a bone again if, after being broken and set, it has mended crookedly, he says: 'This operation of theirs is mistaken and dangerous; if it were right the Ancients would undoubtedly have spoken of it in their books and would have used it.' How greatly he was indebted to the Ancients will be seen in the ensuing Commentary. But from the numerous case-records and other personal observations interspersed throughout the work it is evident that the author was a working doctor, a practical surgeon. Like Paulus Aegineta, his principal source, he draws both on the writings of his predecessors and on his own experience. He describes many operative procedures and instru- ments which do not appear in extant classical writings and which may therefore be regarded as his own, or at least as being part of distinctively Arab practice. The following instances merit special attention in this respect. The tonsil guillotine and its use (II, 36); the concealed knife and its case for opening abscesses (II, 46 and fig. 112); the trocar for paracentesis (II, 54); the possibility that Albucasis or his contemporaries invented true scissors (II, 57 and several figures); the syringe (II, 59); the lithotrite (II, 60); and his design of vaginal speculum (II, 77). This chapter on gynae- cological instruments gives reason for thinking that Albucasis anticipated Chamberlen's obstetric forceps, though not for a live delivery. Then there is the use of animal gut as suture material (II, 85); the description of, possibly, thrombophlebitis migrans (II, 93); the well-illustrated account of the reducing table for extending limbs in order to reduce dislocations or displaced fracture ends (III, 31); and the formula for a kind of plaster casing anticipating the modern plaster cast (III, 27). The fame of the Surgery spread rapidly in the Islamic world. In the second half of the twelfth century it was translated into Latin at Toledo by Gerard of Cremona, under the title of Liber Alsaharavi de cirurgia, and its influence thenceforth on Italian and, subsequently, French surgeons was enormous. We may instance William de Saliceto in the thirteenth century iz and, in the next century, Guy de Chauliac, the most celebrated surgeon of the age, who ranked Albucasis with Hippocrates and Galen. Fabricius ab Aquapendente (1533-1619) named the three authors, one Roman, one Greek, one Arab, to whom he owed much: Celsus, Paulus Aegineta, and Albucasis. The first appearance of Gerard's version in print was together with Guy de Chauliac's Cyrurgia parva (Venice, 1497; two more editions in 1499 and 1500). Further editions from the press at Venice of Lucantonio de Giunta the Florentine appeared in 1520, 1532, and 1540, the first and second of these together with the Chirurgia of the Bolognese surgeon Pietro d'Argellata (d. 1423). In the fifteenth century a Turkish translation, entitled Jarrahlye-i Ilkhaniye, was made by Sabunju-oghlu Sharaf al-Din ibn 'All al-Hajj Ilyas. This version is remarkable for the illustrations,1 which show not only the instruments but the patient and the surgeon too, in the act of performing the various operations. The first modern edition of the text, with a Latin translation, appeared at Oxford in 1778. This was John Channing's two-volume Albucasis de chirurgia, arabice et latine. It includes some rather uninformative figures of the instruments, not true copies of the drawings in the two Bodleian manu- scripts.
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