Saturday, February 27, 2016

Surgical Instruments

Many surgical instruments of modern age are exactly the same in design as those in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His forceps , bone saws ,scalpels,  scissors for eye surgery and more than 200 tools he developed are more or less the same used today.The credit goes to him that he was the one who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and medical capsules can be made from it . In the 13th century, a Muslim doctor  Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered. Muslims doctors also invented anesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes;  a technique still used today.