How is scientific knowledge made alive? How theories written in learned treatises, and thus are frozen as a moment in history, survive the longue durée? The answer lies in the fluidity of knowledge and the flexibility of professionals, artisans and laypersons who engage with it. What we do not know yet is exactly how 'fluidity' and 'flexibility' happen as historical processes. This panel positions the movement of medicine between audiences and modes of discussion and practice to advance a new understanding of the actual mechanisms that facilitate fluidity and flexibility. Our focus is medicine among the Ottomans between the 15th and 18th centuries, as Ottoman reality presents an especially complex mosaic of groups and individuals. Ottomans differed among themselves in the ways they engaged with medicine as a body of knowledge and social interaction along professional, social, cultural, ethnic and religious lines. Indeed, their interpretations to what 'medicine' could be dissimilar. The major transformations of the 19th centuries included a profound change in concepts and applications of knowledge throughout the Ottoman world and hence this period is outside the scope of this panel.
Based on different genres of scientific writing (notebooks, medical compendia, poetry, magical formulae, and recipes) in different languages (Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Hebrew and Latin), the four examples presented in the panel reveal how varied possible paths and modes of movement of scientific knowledge and practice could be. One paper concentrates on a 15th century Turkish corpus of medical works and explores how classical treatments on the regimen of health were adapted during the process of translation and transference into the Turkish vernacular. The presenter argues that the vernacularization of Arabic medical knowledge was a form of popularization (despite elite patronage), making medical knowledge accessible to a wider audience beyond scholastic circles. A second paper moves from Anatolia to Crete and Italy with Moses Galeano/Musa Jalinus' interest in Latin medical texts. The presenter claims that the interest of Ottomans in Latin was an important part of an intellectual exchange in the late 15th and early 16th centuries in the Eastern Mediterranean. Latin allowed this Ottoman Jewish scholar to move between different audiences, namely Jewish networks, the Sultan's court, and the Veneto in Italy. The third paper focusses on the 17th century and the growing awareness of alchemy among Ottomans. The presenter shows that alchemy reached an audience well beyond the learned elite of the Empire. The fourth paper concentrates on 18th century Ömer Şifai and the spread of chemical medicine in the Ottoman lands. Together the four papers reveal how learned scientific knowledge can be deeply transformed to suit the needs of new audiences, and that this characteristic of knowledge is central to its social and intellectual practices.
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Dr. Sara Nur Yildiz
From the fourteenth century ownwards in medieval Anatolia and the Ottoman realm, classical Arabic medical and pharmaceutical texts were translated or adapted into the newly emerging literary language of Anatolian Turkish. Turcophone authors likewise composed original medical works both in Arabic and the Turkish vernacular, drawing largely on the vast corpus of Arabic works circulating throughout the Islamic world, such as the court physician Muḥammed b. Maḥmūd Şirvānī (d. ca. in between 841/1438 and 1451).
Among Şirvānī’s works, which were largely composed for royal patrons, are two regimen of health (regimen sanitatis) guidebooks, a genre of medical literature popular in both the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds concerned with maintaining humoral balance for maximum health by adopting moderate habits and proper hygiene. Rooted in Greek humoral theory, these practical handbooks provide specific advice for keeping in check the six “non-naturals”: air, food and drink, exercise and rest, sleeping and waking, repletion and excretion, and the passions and emotions. While he composed his first regimen of health (the Yaʿqūbiyya) in Arabic for the Germiyanid ruler, Yaʿḳūb Beg (r. 1402-1429), Şirvānī rendered the second version in the Turkish vernacular (the Sulṭāniyye) for the Ottoman sultan, Meḥmed I (d. 1420). The Arabic version exists in a unique manuscript, indicating a limited reception and circulation, as opposed to the Turkish vernacular version which was subsequently copied well into the sixteenth century. This paper proposes to compare the Arabic version of Şirvānī’s regimen of health with the Turkish one in order to better understand the relation between the vernacularized text and its Arabic counterpart. It also will attempt to trace Şirvānī’s Arabic sources (possibly Maimonides’s Fī Tadbīr al-Ṣiḥḥah?) to better understand how he drew on well-established classical Arabic textual traditions. One may assume that, in attempting to gain Ottoman patronage, Şirvānī turned to Turkish in order to make his text more widely accessible. This paper thus pivots around the following question: in choosing to compose in the vernacular, how did Şirvānī’s goal of greater accessibility reshape the text; i.e., how did popularizing through vernacularizing change the structure, contents, emphasis and rhetoric of the text?
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Prof. Robert G. Morrison
This presentation will focus on Mūsā Jālīnūs (d. after 1542), a scholar who wrote in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish as Mūsā Jālīnūs and in Hebrew as Moses Galeano, on a variety of subjects. Earlier research has shown that Jālīnūs was an important scholarly intermediary between the Ottoman Empire and the Veneto, and was involved in the passage of information about theoretical astronomy that would later appear in the works of Renaissance astronomers, including Copernicus (d. 1543). We know too that Jālīnūs produced an Arabic version of a Latin astronomy text and dedicated the Arabic text to a high-ranking Ottoman judge.
In order to understand fully this Jālīnūs' role in the exchange of information about astronomy, more attention is needed to his work as a physician. Jālīnūs' Ottoman Turkish text on pharmaceutical therapy refers to Latin medical texts that are not available in an Islamic language. Thus, Jālīnūs' interest in Latin medical texts would have given him additional incentive to speak with Christian physicians during his travels in the Veneto around 1500. More important, Jālīnūs himself presented his knowledge of Latin (and Jewish) medical texts in the dedication of the Ottoman text to Beyazit II’s chief physician as a major virtue of the text. Figures at Beyazid II’s court were interested in knowledge from non-Islamic societies.
Jālīnūs' Hebrew text, Puzzles of Wisdom describes the intense competition among the physicians at Beyazit II's court. He named other physicians and, repeatedly and at some length, criticized their knowledge of medicine and science as well as their therapeutic decisions. While there were a number of Jewish physicians at Beyazit II’s court, Jālīnūs saw his co-religionists more as competitors than as colleagues. The entire text of Puzzles of Wisdom evinced one-upmanship.
Jālīnūs’ identity as a physician is an important part of the social context for the rest of his achievements as the competition for prestige and patronage certainly drove his interest in Latin texts.
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Mr. Tuna Artun
The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed a growing awareness of alchemy, and the canonical sources of this branch of knowledge, among the learned elite of the Ottoman Empires Turkophone central lands. Rumi scholars from Anatolia, the Balkans, and Istanbul wrote numerous books and treatises on the subjectalmost all in Arabicin this period and came under the marked influence of Izz al-din Aydemir al-Jildaki (d. after 1343), an Egyptian sage who had previously been a little-known figure in the lands of Rum. The next hundred years that followed was characterized
by an ever intensifying vernacularization effort: a substantial number of major works of the classical period by alchemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan and Ibn Wahshiyya were translated into Turkish, along with some of the Arabic works authored by Ottoman scholars themselves. Dozens of new works, both in verse and prose, were composed in Turkish, also in the seventeenth century.
It is clear that alchemy eventually reached an audience beyond the
trilingual learned elite of the empire, but does this constitute a
popularization of alchemical knowledge? The aforementioned Turkish works do not allow us to provide a satisfactory answer to this question, precisely because their authors (but not the entirety of their readership) considered themselves to belong to an exclusive network of seekers and philosophers who inquired into the secrets of divine knowledge. The present talk will offer some thoughts on the issue of popularization through an unassuming source: the notebook of an anonymous alchemist from 1630s Istanbul. The notebook in question brings together a wide range of material about alchemy, from partial translations of Arabic treatises to popular alchemical poems in the Turkish vernacular, as well as hundreds of recipes, magical formulae, a bibliography of the corpus of al-Jildaki, and some very candid remarks by the owner of the notebook. Taken together, these individual elements provide an unparalleled glimpse into the intellectual horizons, and doubts, of a struggling alchemist in
seventeenth-century Istanbul.
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Dr. Rainer Broemer
Co-Authors: Ayman Atat
Paracelsus (d. 1541) was one of the first physicians to pose a lasting challenge to the foundations of medicine as it had been practiced for two millennia in Europe, North Africa, and West and South Asia. Rejecting authority, Paracelsus replaced Hippocrates’ and Galen’s elements and properties by alchemical principles and astrological correlations, refusing to use Latin and instead publishing in German – although some followers wrote about his theories again in Latin, making them available to an international audience.
A century after Paracelsus, Salih b. Nasrallah (d. 1670), who claimed knowledge of Latin, made numerous references to the “new,” or “chemical,” medicine, including inorganic drugs to his pharmacopeia. While his writings survived in numerous copies, much less is known about the actual application of his innovations in medical treatment, beyond the fact that raw material for alchemical drugs were being traded during (and already before) his period of activity.
In the early 18th century, “chemical” medicine was prominent enough in the Ottoman Empire to come to the attention of the Sultan, who banned its use for a number of years. However, in the second quarter of the century, its fortunes returned, and it was in this period that we see the activities of Bursalı Ömer Şifai (d. 1742), whose oeuvre is at the center of the research project presented in this talk. Ömer Şifai left a large number of writings, mostly in Turkish, though some important texts also survive in Arabic. The best known work is a short treatise with drug recipes and advice for their use, based on Paracelsian principles. The existing bibliography of his writings is sketchy. Thus, the project presented here undertakes a review of available manuscripts, mainly from Turkey, based on autopsy, and investigates the relation to Ömer Şifai’s sources, both traditional (e.g., his massive pharmacopeia based on Ibn al-Baytar) and innovative (e.g., Paracelsus and his followers). In his period, Galenic and Avicennan approaches were clearly dominant in the Islamic world, and to a great extent in Europe as well. The reaction to challenges like that of Paracelsianism often were subtle, incorporating individual drugs rather than opening the conceptual foundations to discussion. The activities of Ömer Şifai as a doctor, writer, and translator shed light on a crucial period for the development of medical practice in the Ottoman Empire at a time when in Europe, too, the break with humoral medicine and the Galenic tradition is developing.
