A surgery textbook Europe leaned on for 500 years

Around the year 1000, the Andalusian physician al-Zahrawi completed 'al-Tasrif,' a thirty-volume medical encyclopedia. Its surgical section — illustrating roughly 200 instruments and describing techniques such as catgut for internal stitches — was translated into Latin (by Gerard of Cremona in the late 12th century) and served as a standard reference in European medical schools for roughly five hundred years.

One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.