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This is a rather curt way of treating so large a subject as dental prosthesis, but it contains a lot of suggestive material. He was quoting mainly the Arabian authors, and especially Abulcasis and Ali Abbas and Rhazes, and these of course, as we have said, mentioned many methods of artificially replacing teeth as also of transplantation and of treatment of the deformities of the dental arches.

Undoubtedly the most important of Abulcasis' contemporaries is the famous physician whose Arabic name, Ibn Sina, was transformed into Avicenna.

They can occur either congenitally or from injury, as, for instance, burning. They should be separated, and then separation maintained by means of bandages or by the insertion between them of a thin lead plate, which prevents their readhesion. Adhesions of the fingers with the palm of the hand, which Abulcasis has also seen, should be treated the same way.

His instruction for first aid to the injured in case of hemorrhage in the absence of the physician, is to apply pressure directly upon the wound itself. The development of the surgical specialties among the Arabs is particularly interesting. Abulcasis has much to say about nasal polyps.

Guy de Chauliac has quoted Albucasis about two hundred times in his "Chirurgia Magna." Abulcasis insisted that for successful surgery a detailed knowledge of anatomy was, above all, necessary. He said that the reason why surgery had declined in his day was that physicians did not know their anatomy. The art of medicine, he added further, required much time.

Under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, he published translations of Rhazes, Isaac Judæus, Serapion, Abulcasis, and Avicenna. His work was done in Toledo, the city in which, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so many translators were at work making books for the Western world. Constantine did much more than merely bring out his translations of Arabian works.

After Rhazes, the most important contributors to medical literature from among the Arabs, with the single exception of Avicenna, were born in Spain. They are Albucasis or Abulcasis, the surgeon; Avenzoar, the physician, and Averroës, the philosophic theorist in medicine. Besides, it may be recalled here that Maimonides, the great Jewish physician, was born and educated at Cordova, in Spain.

He lays a good deal of stress on the necessity for freeing the vein thoroughly and lifting it well out of tissues before incising it. In old cases special care must be taken not to tear the vein. Minute details of technique are often found in these old authors. Abulcasis, for instance, treats of adherent fingers with up-to-date completeness.

It was from these men that the Arabian physicians and surgeons obtained their traditions of medicine, and so it is not surprising to find that they discuss dental diseases and their treatment rationally and in considerable detail. Abulcasis particularly has much that is of significance and interest. We have pictures of two score of dental instruments that were used by them.

With the disturbances that had come from political strife and the invasion of the barbarians in Italy, Spain had undoubtedly come to hold the primacy in the intellectual life of Europe at the time when the Arabs took possession of the peninsula. The most important of the Arabian surgeons of the Middle Ages is Albucasis or Abulcasis, also Abulkasim, who was born near Cordova, in Spain.