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In this article, I suggest that looking at the entangled issues of the creation of a new field of knowledge and the interaction with Others’ learning allows for a more accurate understanding of how Persian medical studies have developed and adapted to different natural and cultural settings during late medieval and early modern periods. This article studies the translation and reception of materials drawn from alchemy (rasaśāstra) and rejuvenating therapy (rasāyana) in the Persianate medical culture of South Asia. Chapters dealing with processed mercury and metals become a standard subject of Persian medical works written by Muslim and Hindu physicians in South Asia. Many of these works are in fact composite writings which combine Ayurvedic and Greco-Arabic materials. However, rasāyana is a branch of knowledge for which there is not a precise equivalent domain in the target culture. How does translation deal and negotiate with this asymmetry? In this study, I assume that cross-cultural translation implies a cognitive shift in the way different groups of readers may understand and classify a certain form of knowledge. I look at the Persian translation of materials drawn from rasāyana chiefly from the reader perspective which focuses on the hermeneutical and accommodation process through which translated materials are integrated into the target culture.

The fundamental concepts of the theory of humours of Avicennian thought are often seen as static and ahistorical entities whose identity and function were defined once and for all in the classical sources. This article questions this view by looking at the Šifā al-mara , a Persian medical handbook written in India by ṣihāb al-Dīn Nāgawrī in 790/1388. In the first chapter, Nāgawrī proposes a shift of perspective in the classical categorisation of humoural pathology of the Arabic and Persian texts. His proposal is based on a combination of Avicennian and Ayurvedic physicians' views through the assimilation of notions of the latter into the conceptual framework of the former. Nāgawrī's audacious proposal addresses a key question, since the classification of humours constitutes a central element of the doctrinal identities of both the Avicennian and the Ayurvedic schools. Moreover, a closer reading of this chapter raises the question of whether Nāgawrī's intent was to revise both doctrines at the base of his hybrid nosography. His model can be read not only as a key adjustment to the Avicennian view but also as a reconsideration of the Ayurvedic theory which does not count blood among the humours.

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