Surgery in Arabic: Aspects of a Technical Term

In the present paper, an attempt will be made to interpret the expressions al-ʿilāǧ bi-l-ḥadīd bi-l-yad and ʿilāǧ al-ḥadīd bi-l-yad, respectively, which appear once in the Arabic translation of Galen’s De anatomia mortuorum. The various renderings of the Greek stem cheirourg- in the Arabic translations of Galen’s works will be checked. Then the expressions al-ʿilāǧ bi-l-yad and al-ʿilāǧ bi-l-ḥadīd will be interpreted and their relationship determined. So that our conclusions may be based on a wider corpus, the two expressions will also be analyzed in az-Zahrāwī’s Surgery.