Abulcasis biography books

In the tenth century of the Common Era, in the city of Cordoba in the Andalusia region of Moorish Spain, lived the Muslim physician Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, known to the Latin West as Albucasis.  Albucasis was born in 936 and died in 1013 CE, and is generally recognized as being the leading Muslim surgeon of the Middle Ages, and the Father of Modern Surgery.

 Although advances in surgery are what Albucasis is most known for, and the invention of many different surgical instruments is attributed to him, his skill and expertise in the art of medicine didn’t stop there.  Albucasis was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy, which was a fatal condition in his day, and he correctly identified the hereditary nature of hemophilia. 

Albucasis’ crowning achievement, his magnum opus, was a 30 volume encyclopedia of medicine and surgery called Kitab al-Tasrif, or The Method of Medicine, which