turkish historical review 9 (2018) 213-241 brill.com/thr Medicine in Practice: European Influences on the Ottoman Medical Habitat Ebru Boyar Middle East Technical University, Ankara
[email protected] Abstract This article considers the transfer of medical knowledge from Europe to the Ottoman empire and argues that what was significant in such transfer was medical practice rath- er than textual transfer, that the Ottomans were open to adopting medical knowledge from the non-Islamic world, the deciding factor being not the origin but the success- ful nature of the treatment, and that if there was a border which medical knowledge did not traverse, it was one created by everyday custom not by any Muslim/Christian divide or rejection of knowledge from outside. Keywords Ottoman medicine – syphilis – plague – Paracelsus – Galenic medicine – transfer of knowledge – Jewish physicians Traditionally Ottoman medicine has tended to be defined as Islamic by schol- ars in the field,1 who have also argued that ‘true’ European influence can only be found from the seventeenth century onwards. Bedi Şehsuvaroğlu, who 1 Uludağ, Osman Şevki, Osmanlılar Devrinde Türk Hekimliği, ed. Esin Kahya (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2010), pp. 115 and 119; Adıvar, Abdülhak Adnan, Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim (Istanbul: Maarif Matbaası, 1943), passim; Şehsuvaroğlu, Bedi N., “Anadolu Türklerinde Eczacılık Öğretimine Bir Bakış ve İstanbul Eczacılık Fakültesi”, İstanbul Üniversitesi Eczacılık Fakültesi Mecmuası, 1/1 (1965), p. 91; Ağırakça, Ahmet, “Osmanlı Tıbbının Kaynakları”, in Osmanlılarda Sağlık i, ed. Coşkun Yılmaz and Necdet Yılmaz (Istanbul: Esen Ofset, 2006), p. 151. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/18775462-00903001Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 12:54:56AM via free access <UN> 214 Boyar has published much on this subject, has argued that Ottoman medicine was a continuation of Seljuk medicine, which he described as “Islamic, oriental and scholastic”, and that Ottoman medicine only “came into true contact with the West” in the seventeenth century.