This article depicts the difficulties met while dealing with the history of modern surgery in the Arab and Muslim world. Some of these obstacles are linked to the lack of organized archives, the rarity of secondary literature and tentative syntheses in the field. Others are of more epistemological nature, such as the lack of elaborated problematic and interpretative framework. The author suggests some means to circumvent the listed obstacles. More positively, the history of modern surgery, far from being reducible to a succession of innovation transfers between centers and their peripheries, yields a complex picture of scientists interacting (in local communities as well as diasporas), and is highly revealing of a variety of cultural and religious issues, more or less specific to every society. Finally, such a study promises new venues on the history of the modern body, explored, repaired, restored and potentially reshaped by surgical technics
