Contributions of Avicenna to surgery and anesthesiology

Abstract

Background: Avicenna, as the Persian physician has had a great contribution to the field of medical sciences, especially surgery in 10th and 11th centuries AD.

Methods: In the present paper, a few translated quoted words of Avicenna were shared about his surgical practice. Indexing databases of PubMed and Google Scholar were searched using the keywords like Avicenna, surgery, and anesthesiology to find related papers and documents.

Results: The first portion comprises of some most commonly used simple and compound herbal preparations to produce general and local anesthetics before the surgery and as dental anesthetic agents. In the second portion, practices regarding surgical management for skull fractures, spinal trauma, bone fracture, cataract, incurable urinary retention, bladder calculi, hemorrhoids, cancer as well as endotracheal intubation and tracheostomy have also been incorporated. Finally, it ends up with practices regarding the use of natural products as postoperative dressing for traumatic and surgical wounds and after cataract surgery.

Conclusion: Findings of this review study will provide a brief insight on Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine to the sciences of anesthesiology and surgery based on the recent investigations.

Keywords:

• Persian medicine
• history
• surgery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).