Al-Zahrawi (Abulcasis)

Physician to the Andalusian court and author of Al-Tasrif, whose final volume was the largest surgical encyclopaedia of its age. He invented and illustrated more than 200 surgical instruments (forceps, specula, dilators, catheters), introduced cotton sutures and dissolvable gut threads, and established surgery as an independent science whose tools were used in Europe for some five centuries.