Al-Zahrawi and the Kitab al-Tasrif

The surgeon of Madinat al-Zahra outside Cordoba who spent about fifty years on a thirty-book medical encyclopaedia and closed it with an illustrated treatise on operations and the roughly two hundred instruments they need. Translated at Toledo, the surgical part became a European teaching text for centuries. The reachable literature on him is admiring and short on scepticism, and the long list of firsts it credits him with should be read with that in mind.