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Professional Jealousy and Envy: Competition among Physicians in the Ottoman World
Abstract
Medicine was a brutally competitive occupation in the early modern Ottoman world. The competition on clients, financial gains and professional recognition was endless. This situation bread a range of emotions. In this presentation I will emphasize envy when physician felt they lacked desired medical skill and knowledge colleagues did possess, and jealousy when the existing clientele and recognition were threatened by other healers. The medical reality in the Ottoman world was of diverse medical practices, with numerous types of healers drawing their legitimacy from different origins (hence the preference for the broader term 'medical healers' over the narrower 'physician'). The three main etiologies were the Ottoman adaptation with many additions of Arab-Islam Galenic Humoralism; religious medicine titled 'Prophetic medicine'; and folklore based on indigenous custom. The different medical systems presented themselves as independent, but the reality was considerable and meaningful overlap in knowledge and clinical reality. Furthermore, none could boast superior success and efficiency. In the absence of clear medical hegemony, competition thrived. Many medical healers struggled to make a living. In order to do so, they had to deal with their patients and the patients' relatives. The sijills, the registers from the Ottoman Muslim courts, attest that patients and their families could be very unsatisfied customers who could sue their healers. Even the private healers of the Ottoman elite contended with tensions. In addition to their own professional rivalries, private healers had to deal with the politics of their patients and patrons; their medical career was tied with the success and wellbeing of those they took medical care of. Previous studies discussed the Ottoman medical system in the early modern period, and many more studies analyzed the Ottoman guild systems. Both corpuses of scholarship discussed mechanisms of regulations and standardization as a means of handling the competition. This presentation, however, brings to the forefront the emotional aspect. Based on sijills records, mainly from Istanbul and Jerusalem, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and copies of imperial decrees (mühimme defterleri) – all from the 16th and 17th centuries, I suggest that 'professional jealousy' explains the attitudes and actions of medical healers toward their colleagues. For instance, thinking of jealousy expounds the personal tone that is sometimes found in claims about morality and faith against medical fraud, trickery and charlatanry. If convincing, this line of thought could be adopted to analyze other competitive occupations.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
None
Sub Area
History of Medicine