physicians. Although he owes his reputation chiefly to the treatises which he wrote on surgery Abulcasis was also the author of several medical works. He published a collection of all his writings under the title of "The Tesrif," which is divided into thirty parts or books, and which—according to Lucien Le Clerc—constitutes a veritable encyclopaedia. During the course of the twelfth century Gerard of Cremona translated into Latin the part relating to surgery; it is not known at what time or by whom the remainder of the collection was translated. The author's name in the Latin edition is given, not as Abulcasis, but as Alsaharavius.
During the lifetime of Abulcasis his writings, and especially his work on surgery, were not very highly appreciated in Spain. This was largely due to the fact that the Mohammedan inhabitants of that country did not look upon surgery with any degree of favor. The Arabs of the East held Abulcasis in much greater honor. Guy de Chauliac, the famous French surgeon of the fourteenth century, in his treatise on surgery, quotes Abulcasis no less than two hundred times. Le Clerc, in the course of his remarks upon the value of the surgical treatise written by Abulcasis, says: "This book will always be considered, in the history of medicine, to represent the first formal and distinct scientific treatise on surgery." At the same time, the prevailing testimony makes it appear that the book contains only a small portion of original matter, a large part of its substance having been borrowed from the work of the Greek author, Paulus Aegineta. Its chief merit consists in the orderly and very clear manner in which the facts are presented, and doubtless the popularity of the book was materially increased by the fact that many of the instruments required for the different operations were illustrated pictorially.
Lucien Le Clerc has published (Paris, 1861) a French translation of Abulcasis' Treatise on Surgery, and on page 71 of this version the following statement will be found:—
. . . you may also introduce into the cannula a specially
adapted piston in copper, or a stylet the end of which is armed
