How long can the body go without drinking water or eating? How does one kill thirst when water is unavailable or unsafe? Which drugs can best quell seasickness? This paper will look at medical texts about preparing to travel, and especially by sea, in the premodern Indian Ocean World. Many texts reflected a world in which travel was simultaneously common and dangerous, because it exposed bodies to “airs, waters and places” far different from what they were accustomed to. For example, a manuscript from the personal collection of al-Malik al-Af?al al-‘Abb?s, a Ras?lid sultan who reigned from 1363-1377, includes a short treatise on medicine addressed to the prospective traveller (man ‘azama ‘al? ‘l-safar). The manuscript includes several other medical texts -- some composed by the sultan himself. I will compare these with relevant chapters from Persian texts composed in Ahmedabad by Shih?b al-D?n al-Nagawr? at the end of the fourteenth century. These sources were composed at two major crossroads in the region: Ras?lid Yemen and Mu?affarid Gujarat. For many, the idea of sea travel conjures narratives from the Atlantic World: “high sea exploration” in the age of European colonialism. This attests to the longevity of colonial discourses both within academia and in popular cultural, though scholarship by Houari Touati has expanded the meanings of Islamic travel. Less understood is the physical experience of travel by land and sea between the emporia dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Fewer still are those accounts connecting texts composed in South Asia and the Middle East. Drawing on medical texts, this paper will bring us closer to the materiality of travel and the bodily experiences of travelers. I will place the medical discourses about travel within the multifaceted cultural understandings of sea travel in late medieval Islamicate contexts. First, I will give an overview of major themes in earlier medical texts on “regimen for travel,” followed by an explanation of how both Arabic and Persian medical texts composed in South Asia have been consistently neglected. Then, I will move to a discussion of a few of the recipes suggested for allaying seasickness and quenching thirst in these texts, using them to trace commonalities and variation in medical practices across the region. Finally, I will ask what these recipes can tell us about sea travel, especially when supplemented by documentary evidence about materia medica from the Cairo Geniza.

Grounded in Greek medical theory and strengthened by diverse pharmacological influences, ?ibb arrived in its South Asian environment from the Middle East around the time the Delhi Sultans established their rule, in the thirteenth century. Those diverse pharmacological influences are the crux of the paper I propose to present. How does the practice of a tradition change when it moves to an entirely new environment, and, more importantly, how can we track such changes and developments. I study Naj?b al-D?n al-Samarqand?’s (d. 1222) al-Asb?b wa al-?Al?m?t and its extensive South Asian commentary tradition to better understand the development of ?ibb in India. To do this, I focus on the paratextual clues offered by the manuscripts. In the case of this paper, I use marginalia pertaining specifically to the treatments recommended by the texts and their authors, and I focus particularly on those marginal notations that suggest a move away from materia medica with more Middle Eastern roots to medical substances that are more Indian in origin. Whereas pharmacological notations suggesting Middle Eastern ingredients tend to quote their treatment regimens from major medical scholars such as Ibn S?n? or al-R?z?, these Indian-specific marginalia do not cite their sources and are more local in ingredient composition. These observations allow me to make conclusions about the changes ?ibb underwent as it settled in South Asia and what that meant for ?ibb? practice, purely from a textual standpoint.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, terror of plague and cholera and the rapid communications allowed by rail and steamship technologies motivated European states to debate sanitary measures and to seek cooperative quarantine arrangements with a newfound urgency. As scientists connected cholera and plague to contaminated water and flea-bitten rats, far-flung and heterogeneous empires jostled for control over profitable trade-routes while scrutinizing and critiquing the efforts of other imperial powers to halt the spread of disease into Europe. In this global context, sanitation and disease took on political importance in the Persian Gulf region as quarantine stations became a focal point of imperial and local political rivalries. This presentation explores how debates over the scientific importance and efficacy of quarantine stations in preventing the spread of disease contributed to ambiguity in zones of spatial and jurisdictional sovereignty, imperial commercial rivalries, and efforts by indigenous rulers to institutionalize their claims to power over local populations. How did the relative economic and political importance of various Gulf port cities shape British quarantine efforts, the placement of quarantine stations, and the spatial and architectural relationships of these stations to the existing built environment? Sanitation reports, British imperial archives, published oral histories, photographs, and maps of Gulf quarantine stations from the early twentieth century show that quarantine enforcement was chaotic and ineffective from a medical point of view during this period. At the same time, global discourse and political pressure to establish these institutions in the Persian Gulf provided local elites with a new venue to assert sovereign claims both to imperial authorities and to diverse populations. As an early effort to institutionalize public health, quarantine stations inserted economic and ethnic hierarchies into the built environment. The inconsistencies and ambiguities of the local sanitation systems, however, allowed quarantined passengers, indigenous elites, and rival states ample opportunity to contest the political and social demands of the emerging relationship between public health and state power.

In April 1963, a Chinese medical team arrived in a rural province in northwestern Algeria, which was in dire need of medical professionals after the “exodus” of French and other European medical staff. Thereafter, a steady trickle of Chinese doctors and nurses followed suit, providing health care for rural and suburban communities with a Chinese “socialist medicine.” This socialist medicine bolstered rejuvenated Chinese medical therapies—the “new acupuncture” and herbal formula medicines—and embodied the Maoist revolutionary ethics of health care. This paper examines how the Chinese medical aid workers attempted to transplant an alternative mode of healing and healthcare ethics to Algeria by focusing on the practice and training of acupuncture in local hospitals in the 1960s-1970s. In their practice, the Chinese biomedical doctors and acupuncturists crossed the boundaries between biomedicine and Chinese medicine, and between different medical specialties, to provide cost-effective cures for their Algerian patients. They further promoted acupuncture as a cheap, effective, and safe method of healing by running training courses for local paramedics. By using archival documents, testimonies, and published memoirs, this paper explores how certain aspects of Chinese medical knowledge were “scientized” and transferred and how the method of practicing acupuncture was transformed and localized in response to the needs and preferences of patients and students. This paper shows that the boundary-crossing moment in Algeria was important in shaping the meaning of “socialist medicine” and giving a medical legitimacy to Chinese acupuncture and medical knowledge.