Historians of medicine in Islamic civilisations tend to suggest an essential quality of medical theories and practices performed in states and empires ruled by Muslim elites. “Islamic medicine”, in a traditional reading, would be organised around a corpus of Hippocratic, Galenic, and Avicennan writings, based on humoral theory and preserved, with minor modifications, well into the twentieth century (e.g., Unani tibb in the Indian Raj). Only gradually does the historical complexity of medical developments across and beyond the Dar al-Islam emerge from under the curtain of essentialist stereotypes. It then emerges that, e.g., medical writers in the Ottoman Empire early on made use of works from western (Italy, Spain) as well as eastern sources (e.g., Persia). Far from being unidirectional, the movement of approaches to healing came in tidal waves often triggered by political commotions (Alavi 2008). This paper analyses some exemplary cases of anatomical descriptions of the human body from the time of Shemseddin Itaki (fl. 1630) to the early nineteenth century, when the Egyptian scholar Hasan al-‘Attar (ca. 1760-1835) reflected his encounter with a variety of medical concepts during his exile in Istanbul, adopting the time-honoured form of a commentary on a classical work by Dawud al-Antaki (d. 1599), while his contemporary Shanizade Ataullah (1771-1826) printed the first medical textbook in Turkish modelled on current European works. Particular emphasis is given to the varied cultural meanings of human anatomy (and physiology), between metaphysics, theology, medical diagnostics and therapeutic interventions.