Shihab al-Din Ahmad al-Hijazi (1388-1471) was an unexceptional legal student in Mamluk Cairo who, at the age of 24, overdosed on marking nut (Arabic baladhur), a potent plant drug valued for its memory-enhancing properties. (A marking nut overdose could also prove fatal, as in the case of the grandfather of the famous historian al-Baladhuri, whose descendants, in remembrance, took the name of the drug into their names.) As a result of the overdose, boils broke out all over al-Hijazi's body, he was unable to eat or sleep, and he lost significant cognitive power. After recovering from the overdose, he abandoned his legal studies and became a leading poet. (His verse is quoted in A Thousand and One Nights.) Most interestingly, al-Hijazi wrote a letter to his dear friend Salah al-Din al-Asyuti (d. 1455) on the tenth night of overdose detailing his suffering, his social isolation and the solace he had found with an unnamed mamluk who was suffering the same physical, psychiatric and social discomforts. The letter is an indictment of his fellow Cairenes who had ignored or mocked him in his illness, though the non-Arab, unfree mamluk condemns most forcefully the social body of fifteenth-century Cairo and their misguided constructions of blighted bodies. Al-Hijazi quotes him as saying: "The deaf person is he who does not pity someone painfully afflicted, and the mute person is he who does not open his mouth, though his body has something to say." Removing disability as a condition rooted in bodies, per se, shows that "the defect is located in environments, institutions, languages, and paradigms of knowledge."1 Al-Asyuti's thoughtful response to his friend is also preserved. I want to read these reflections on friendship, community, illness, health and morality as forming what al-Asyuti termed "a story about the body," or even bodies, specifically, the marked bodies of al-Hijazi and the mamlukand the presumed whole social body of 15th-century Cairo. Additionally, I want to situate these writings in the context of elite, Sunni, Arab male scholarly culture in late medieval Cairo and these scholars' relations with the military class of Turkish slaves. I will also consider the ways that contemporary critical discourse on constructions of disability and physical difference can allow us to frame medieval Arab culture in innovative ways, and pose questions that will generate dialogue among scholars and students within and beyond medieval disability studies.