Abstract
Al Zahrawi, an Arab physician and surgeon, was the one responsible for making surgery as important as medicine in medieval times. He invented many surgical instruments which were later copied and used as standards in surgeries. He contributed to many fields of medicine, including neurology, surgery, orthopedics and gynecology. He recounted his 50 years of hard work in his book, Al Tasreef, which was translated into many languages later. Many of his inventions and surgical instruments have been described in his literature and later served as the foundations for the advanced instrumentation in medical and dental specialties. His immense contribution to dentistry cannot be overlooked. In this review, we attempt to collect and revisit his contributions.
In medieval times the Arab and Persian medicine and surgery was at its pinnacle providing deep foundations for modern medicine and surgery. Among the most popular Arab scientists, Al-Zahrawi was the one who made considerable contribution to dental medicine and surgery. As the names of most of the Arab world scientists were Latinized, such as as Al-Zahrawi named “Albucasis” and Abubakr Rabi ibn Ahmad al-Akhawayni al-Bokhari as “Joveini”, often their work and inventions are overlooked in the contemporary literature. This review highlights the need for the documentation of procedures and inventions especially in field of dentistry in modern literature.
An extensive search was done and 170 documents and a few books were found on databases as Scopus, Pubmed, Mendeley and Google Scholar with the keywords Albucasis, Al Zahrawi, dentistry, Persian medicine and scientists, ranging from years 1926–2026. A few of the documents were not traceable; for example, a 1987 article on dentistry by J.J. Hershfeld could not be retrieved. Other articles which were not in the English language or whose translations were not available, were also excluded. Articles and books dealing exclusively with dentistry are rare. We tried our best to include all the information we could on Albucasis’ contribution to dentistry.
Campbell mentions in his book that the second part of volume 30 deals with dental surgery and other surgical procedures. He describes numerous surgical and dental procedures using Albucasis’s own illustrations.