Just as the Arabs preserved the knowledge of the Greek and Roman civilizations, Europeans were able to use and develop the knowledge built in the Islamic world. This wealth of knowledge was the collection of ideas from every corner of the Islamic empire. Rulers collected Greek, Chinese, Indian, and Persian literary works into vast libraries for the education of the masses. Western Europe slowly learned fragments of this knowledge through trade and the spread of culture. One medium through which the West learned much was medical texts translated by scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Europeans, from Italy to the British Isles, have been able to improve their medical-scientific knowledge by learning to quantify and make careful observations of the natural world. Thanks to this acquisition of knowledge, Europe slowly transformed into a continent equipped with the most advanced methods of providing and distributing medical aid. It was only when Europeans pushed Muslims out of Europe that Europeans learned about the progress made by Muslim scholars. Collecting texts and conquering lands, Western European scholars amassed knowledge about hospitals, disease prevention, and how science should be conducted through observation and not superstition, ushering in a new era in the progression of medical practice . it often consisted of limb amputation and bloodletting as a means of curing disease. These simple but dangerous techniques had unpredictable results. Infection was the biggest problem for surgeons, so to get around the problem they used cauterization of wounds. Avicenna promoted this in his canon of medicine, which established precedence in Weste... the center of the paper... scholarly sources to educate oneself and began to unearth new ways to treat disease. Once Muslims fled Europe, they left behind knowledge of great medical thinkers, concepts of hospitals, how doctors should be educated, and how diseases should be treated and prevented. Works Cited1) Masic, Izet, et al. "Why did medical historians call Ibn al-Nafis the second Avicenna?" Medicinski Arhiv 62.4 (2008): 244-249. MEDLINE. EBSCO. Network. January 31, 2010.2) Selin, Helaine, 1946-, and Hugh Shapiro. Medicine across cultures: History and practice of medicine in non-Western cultures. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Book index with reviews. EBSCO. Network. January 31, 2010.3) Loudon, Irvine. Western Medicine: An Illustrated History. Oxford University Press, 1997. 40-66.4) Prioreschi, Plinio. A history of medicine: Byzantine and Islamic medicine. Omaha: Horace. Press, 2001. 204-270.