Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn al-'Abbās al-Zahrāwī al-Ansari (after 936 - 1013), also known as Al-Zahrawi and Latinised as Abulcasis, was an Arab Andalusian physician and chemist regarded as the father of modern surgery. He was the greatest surgeon of the Middle Ages, although little is known about his actual life outside of his medical achievements.
Al-Zahrawi lived in the state of Al-Andalus, an Islamic-controlled country on the Iberian Peninsular, which is now Spain. He wrote the Kitab al-Tasrif, an encyclopedia of medical and surgical practices that became the main medical textbook for hundreds of years. Many of the medical procedures he developed, such as using catgut for internal stitches, are still used in life-saving surgeries today. He was a pioneer of medicine at a time when most Western doctors used dangerous methods like amputation that usually killed the patients. He invented instruments for performing cataract surgery, bladder stone removals and tracheotomies, the latter procedure being one that he himself proved was safe when he sewed up the throat of a slave girl who had attempted suicide.
In the Kitab al-Tasrif, Al-Zahrawi wrote about the importance of anatomy in performing surgery, pointing to incidents in which Western doctors accidentally killed patients after mistakenly cutting into aneurisms. He also made important contributions to the fields of dentistry and neurosurgery, and performed many successful operations on head injuries.