SCEMS | EMDG | Tunahan Durmaz

Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies

Exploring popular elements in Ottoman medical texts: The curious case of Ibn Sellum’s Gayetü’l-beyân fi tedbir-i bedeni’l-insan

In her seminal work Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500-1700, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn puts forward that Ottoman medicine was composed of three separate building blocks: (1) popular folkloric medicine, (2) mechanistic medicine (i.e., learned medicine), (3) prophetic medicine.[1] Engaging with Mossensohn’s conceptualization, this paper suggests that the learned medicine of the early modern Ottomans posed features that render it organically connected to some folkloric and religious elements. Therefore, a holistic analysis rather than a categorization into subdivisions might help us better tackle the difficulties of defining what the Ottoman medicine was. This method of investigation may also lend us a broader perspective into the uses of Ottoman medicine in larger sections of the Ottoman society. In other words, it may allow us to develop an understanding over the one that restricts the ‘learned’ medicine to the use of a privileged group of people only. Lastly, the paper contextualizes these arguments through an empirical study of Gayetü’l-beyân fi tedbir-i bedeni’l-insan (The Utmost Explanations on the Protection of the Human Body), compiled in 1669 by Ibn Sellum, the physician-in-chief of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV then. 1) Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500-1700 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 22–26.

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SCEMS | EMDG | Tunahan Durmaz

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SCEMS | EMDG | Tunahan Durmaz

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