The Transfer of and Innovation in Medical Knowledge in Western Eurasia, 1300–1700
Panel 214, 2015 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 1:30 pm
Panel Description
This panel proposes to rethink Islamic medicine by tracing the movement of texts and ideas and their modification in place and time during the late medieval to early modern periods. It challenges the prevailing bias that, following the twelfth century, Islamic medicine came to a standstill and entered a period of slow decline. The papers on this panel will trace developments in Islamic medicine by examining the complex textual interplay between tradition and innovation, and theory and observation. By examining the uncharted textual history of post-classical medical texts, they will also suggest new methodological frameworks for historicizing the transfer of medical knowledge, and the development of new interpretations and practices.
The papers on this panel not only engage with a set of post-classical medical texts that remain unedited and unexamined, but they also examine textual forms that have generally been considered derivative and thus of only secondary or tertiary importance: medical commentaries, epitomes, and translations. The fourteenth and fifteenth-centuries witnessed an explosion in epitomes, commentaries and translations of iconic texts such as Ibn al-Baytar’s Compendium of Simples, Ibn Sina’s Qanun, and in particular, commentary writing on the Qanun’s most famous epitome, Ibn al-Nafis’ al-Mujaz. They depict an ongoing transfer and dispersal from the fourteenth century onwards of medical knowledge via these textual forms from the Islamic intellectual centers of Egypt and Syria to a wide geographical reception ranging from the newly Islamizing Anatolian peninsula to the eastern Iranian lands.
Contrary to a common bias that regards commentary writing and epitomes as derivative and uncreative intellectual exercises, the authors propose that these formats were the main vehicles of textual innovation in the late medieval period. Commentaries in effect displaced the original text of the commented-upon iconic work, and through this very displacement made room for new interpretations, critiques and intellectual innovations while honoring the authority of an iconic text. Translations of this period functioned similarly. In addition to linguistic transference, translations remodeled a text according to particular circumstances of interpretation. Furthermore, the reception of iconic medical and pharmacological texts in the 14th and 15th centuries laid the interpretive ground work for their subsequent reworking in the Ottoman and Safavid realms, often within specific institutional settings, such as the hospital-medical madrasa complex.
The circulation of pharmacological-botanical knowledge throughout the Mediterranean involved a continuous modification and expansion of the Dioscorides tradition as it reached its culmination in Ibn al-Baytar’s voluminous Arabic text, The Compendium of Simple Drugs and Foods. Through the examination of the subsequent reception of this text and its abridgements and translations in Ilkhanid Baghdad, medieval Turcophone western Anatolia, Injuid Shiraz, and the Ottoman and Safavid realms, this paper examines how this pharmaceutical knowledge was reshaped in different formats and languages as it travelled through time and place and changing circumstances.
Composed in 1242 for the Ayyubid sultan with around 1400 alphabetically organized animal, vegetable and mineral medicines based on over 150 authorities, Ibn al-Baytar’s Compendium represents the height of knowledge of non-compounded drugs in the medieval Christian and Muslim worlds. In 1311, in Mongol-controlled Bagdad, Yusuf b. Ismail ibn al-Kutubi produced an Arabic abridgement of the text, popularly known as Jam‘ al-Baghdadi. This Arabic abridgement formed the basis of subsequent Turkish and Persian translations in the fourteenth century. An unidentified translator rendered it into Turkish upon the bequest of ‘Umur Beg (r. 1334-1348), the Aydınid ruler based at Smyrna (İzmir). In 1368-9, Zayn al-‘Attar partially translated the work into Persian for the Injuid court at Shiraz.
The contents of the abridged and translated versions of Ibn Baytar’s original text continued to be reworked throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in both the Safavid and Ottoman realms. This text, in multiple permutations, likewise became subject to criticism, as we see with Davud al-‘Antaqi’s Tadhkira alwa al-albab and Sayyid Muḥammad Mu’min al-Mazandarani’s Persian Tuhfat al-Mu’minin. Writing in 1669, the Safavid court physician al-Mazandarani intended his work to be a corrective to the above-mentioned Zayn al-‘Attar’s Persian version of the Jam‘ al-Baghdadi, which he describes as being full of mistakes and inaccuracies. In turn, the Tuhfat al-Mu’minin was translated into Ottoman Turkish.
The Shaykh ul-islam Ibn Kemal’s prolific literary output included medicine but, unlike his multi-volume history of the Ottoman dynasty and works on jurisprudence, his writings on plague and opium have not been contextualized by modern scholarship as part of his scholarly trajectory and rise as the most prominent Ottoman scholar in the first half of the sixteenth century. Through the study of his madrasa appointments and medical works on plague and opium, I argue that he was a medical practitioner who incorporated the language of practice and observation into his works, parallel to his use of oral accounts in his historical writing. In addition to referencing the ancient Greek authors, Ibn Kemal refers to contemporary debates and arguments in his medical works. He likewise draws upon his theoretical knowledge and experience in treating opium addicts through novel methods.
In his plague treatise, Ibn Kemal describes how he exchanged medical knowledge with local physicians and observed the spread of and treatments for contagious disease during his travels throughout Anatolia and Syria. Ibn Kemal emphasized the use of vinegar and various citrus fruits for the prevention and treatment of contagious diseases. These prescriptions in which fruits and vegetables played an important role in the medical treatments were part of the rise in the production of fruits and vegetables in the cities and their vicinity and their consumption. In a way similar to his role as a propagandist against the Shi’ite Safavids, Ibn Kemal’s medical writing on the plague (ta’un) advocated different kinds of consumption practices. After presenting his plague treatise to Bayezid II, Ibn Kemal was appointed professor at the state-of-the-art medical school in Edirne where he was able to put into in practice the ideas he advocated in his treatise.
Avicenna’s al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb provided the foundation for the teaching and practice of medicine in post-1200 Islamic societies. Its abridgments and commentaries were used to train physicians well into the nineteenth century. However, these commentaries and abridgments have barely received the attention they deserve by historians who often dismiss them as being derivative and unoriginal. In this paper, I shall show that not only do the commentaries contain much that is original or at least worthy of attention, but that closer examinations of these texts can reveal much about medical education and the processes by which these commentaries were generated.
The most popular abridgment of the Qānūn was the Mūjaz which is attributed to Ibn al-Nafīs (d. 1288). Although many commentaries were composed on it over the years, one of the most popular ones was Kitāb al-Nafīsī by Nafīs ibn ‘Iwaḍ al-Kirmānī (d. 1449), produced under the patronage of Ulugh Begh in Samarqand. Kitāb al-Nafīsī drew upon the earlier commentary by Jamāl al-Dīn al-Aqsarā’ī (d. 1337), and formed the basis of a later commentary by Ibn al-Mubārak al-Qazwīnī (d. 1521), a physician at the courts of three successive Ottoman sultans Bayezid II, Selim I and Süleyman. These three texts thus formed a network of commentaries that were copied, read and taught across Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iran and Central Asia over the course of two centuries. The paper will examine some manuscripts of these works to gain insight into the movements of these texts, and their use in medical education. It will also examine some passages from the medical commentaries themselves to reveal the nature of the discussions, and how the commentators moved the discussions beyond the source text into uncharted territories. In some cases, this resulted in very novel consequences for medical theory.
