A monkey chewing lute strings pointed a Cordoba surgeon toward dissolving stitches
Al-Zahrawi, a tenth-century surgeon in Cordoba, reportedly noticed that his pet monkey had eaten the gut strings of his oud and digested them. Catgut, he realised, was a natural material the body could break down. He began using it for internal stitches, a practice surgeons still follow more than a thousand years later.
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, known in Latin Europe as Albucasis, was born around 936 in Azahara, a palace city just outside Cordoba founded that same year. His name suggests ancestry among the Ansar of Medina. He spent nearly all his life in Cordoba, studying, teaching and operating, served as court physician to the caliph al-Hakam II, and died in about 1013. Because Azahara was destroyed in later wars, almost nothing personal survives beyond his writing.
That writing is enormous. His Kitab al-Tasrif, finished in 1000, runs to thirty volumes covering pharmacology, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, dentistry, childbirth and more, distilled from nearly 50 years of practice. He placed surgery last on purpose, calling it the highest branch of medicine, one nobody should attempt without mastering the others first. He insisted on anatomy, warning that a surgeon who mistook an aneurysm for an abscess could kill a patient instantly. He urged treating patients regardless of social status and spoke fondly of his students as his children.
The closing volume, On Surgery and Instruments, was the earliest surgical manual to carry illustrations, with drawings of each tool beside the steps for using it. He introduced over 200 instruments, from scalpels and specula to double-tipped hooks, and devised an early lithotrite for crushing bladder stones without cutting. In dentistry he bound loose teeth with gold and silver wire and is credited with the first tooth replantation. He also described the inherited nature of haemophilia and techniques later credited to others, including tying off blood vessels almost 600 years before Ambroise Paré.
Gerard of Cremona translated the surgical volume into Latin in the 12th century, and it became standard at medical schools such as Salerno and Montpellier. For roughly 500 years it was Europe's main surgical text. The historian Arturo Castiglioni judged that it held the same authority in surgery that Avicenna's Canon held in medicine.
Source: Al-Zahrawi
