section_path: Natural sciences/Biology/Medicine and surgery
section_name: Medicine and surgery
paragraph_text: Medicine and surgery
  
  For Islamic scholars, Indian and Greek physicians and medical researchers Sushruta, Galen, Mankah, Atreya, Hippocrates, Charaka, and Agnivesha were pre-eminent authorities. In order to make the Indian and Greek tradition more accessible, understandable, and teachable, Islamic scholars ordered and made more systematic the vast Indian and Greco-Roman medical knowledge by writing encyclopedias and summaries. Sometimes, past scholars were criticized, like Rhazes who criticized and refuted Galen's revered theories, most notably, the Theory of Humors and was thus accused of ignorance. It was through 12th-century Arabic translations that medieval Europe rediscovered Hellenic medicine, including the works of Galen and Hippocrates, and discovered ancient Indian medicine, including the works of Sushruta and Charaka. Works such as Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine were translated into Latin and disseminated throughout Europe. During the 15th and 16th centuries alone, The Canon of Medicine was published more than thirty-five times. It was used as a standard medical textbook through the 18th century in Europe. The largely dominant theory of the time was Humorism where four separate “humors” (liquid substances, including blood, phlegm, yellow bile and dark bile) whose balance were thought to be the key to health and a natural body-temperature. In the book Al Shakook ala Jalinoos or "The Doubt on Galen" al-Razi criticized some of Galen’s theories, particularly humorism, saying that they did not agree with his own clinical observations. Arab physician Ibn Zuhr provided proof that scabies is caused by the itch mite and that it can be cured by removing the parasite without the need for purging, bleeding or other treatments called for by humorism, making a break with the humorism of Galen and Avicenna.
  
  Regarding the cardiovascular system, Ibn al-Nafis in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon was the first known scholar to contradict the contention of the Galen School that blood could pass between the ventricles in the heart through the cardiac inter-ventricular septum that separates them, saying that there is no passage between the ventricles at this point. Instead, he correctly argued that all the blood that reached the left ventricle did so after passing through the lung. He also stated that there must be small communications, or pores, between the pulmonary artery and pulmonary vein, a prediction that preceded the discovery of the pulmonary capillaries of Marcello Malpighi by 400 years. The Commentary was rediscovered in the twentieth century in the Prussian State Library in Berlin; whether its view of the pulmonary circulation influenced scientists such as Michael Servetus is unclear.
  
  In neurology, Rhazes stated that nerves had motor or sensory functions, describing 7 cranial and 31 spinal cord nerves. He assigned a numerical order to the cranial nerves from the optic to the hypoglossal nerves. He classified the spinal nerves into 8 cervical, 12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 3 sacral, and 3 coccygeal nerves. He used this to link clinical signs of injury to the corresponding location of lesions in the nervous system.
  
  In infectious diseases, Rhazes differentiated through careful observation the two diseases smallpox and measles, which were previously lumped together as a single disease that caused rashes. This was based on location and the time of the appearance of the symptoms and he also scaled the degree of severity and prognosis of infections according to the color and location of rashes. Rhazes, who was once asked to choose the site for a new hospital in Baghdad, suspended pieces of meat at various points around the city, and recommended building the hospital at the location where the meat putrefied the slowest.
  
  In obstetrics and gynaecology, Al-Zahrawi was the first physician to describe an ectopic pregnancy.
  
  In pediatrics, Al-Razi is sometimes called the "Father of pediatrics" for writing the monograph, The Diseases of Children treating paediatrics as an independent field of medicine.
  
  In surgery, the tenth century Arab physician Al-Zahrawi is sometimes referred to as the "Father of surgery". He describes what is thought to be the first attempt at reduction mammaplasty for the management of gynaecomastia and the first mastectomy to treat breast cancer. He is credited with the performance of the first thyroidectomy. He wrote three textbooks on surgery, including Manual of Medial Practitioners which contains a catalog of 278 instruments used in surgery In the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Quff was a physician and surgeon who published numerous books, commentaries, treatises on surgery. Most notably, he wrote Basics in the Art of Surgery, a general medical manual covering anatomy, drugs therapy and surgical care, which was by far the largest Arabic text on surgery during the entire medieval period.