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Social History of Medicine Advance Access published online on February 29, 2008
Social History of Medicine, doi:10.1093/shm/hkn002
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. All rights reserved

A Tale of Two Discourses: The Historiography of Ottoman-Muslim Medicine

Miri Shefer Mossensohn*

* Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: shefer{at}post.tau.ac.il


  Abstract

Summary Although the history of medicine in the Ottoman period has received considerable attention, especially from Turkish scholars, standard general works on the history of Muslim science and medicine after the Middle Ages rarely discuss Turkish and Ottoman medicine. Furthermore, the limited discussion usually does not go beyond referring to great medical discoveries in the Ottoman Empire, or alternatively its intellectual decline. The yardstick for the evaluation of Ottoman medicine seems to have been exposure to and acceptance of European medicine. Ottoman medicine was positioned between two simplistic poles, the dichotomy of ‘east’. In this article, I try to answer two interrelated questions. First, why is it that despite its erudition, Turkish scholarship of Ottoman medicine is hardly utilised by western scholars, even those specialising in Muslim medicine? Secondly, why is it that the two discourses, the Turkish and the western, share (or at least used to share) a non-dynamic image of Ottoman medicine? I claim that the frozen image that appears in the scholarship came about because of two different discourses—one Orientalist and Arabist, the other nationalist and Turkish—which joined together at this particular point for different reasons.

Keywords: historiography; Ottomans; medicine; Islam


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