Al-Zahrawi

Al-Zahrawi, Latinised as Albucasis, was an Arab physician, surgeon and chemist from al-Andalus, considered one of the greatest surgeons of the Middle Ages. His principal work, the Kitab al-Tasrif, is a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practice; its surgery chapter was translated into Latin and became the standard surgical textbook in Europe for the next five hundred years. He pioneered the use of catgut for internal stitches and developed surgical instruments and devices for procedures including Caesarean sections and cataract surgery, some still applied in medicine today. He was the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia and to describe an abdominal pregnancy.